How-tos

Among The World’s Most Popular Cultivated Fruits Only This Fruit Isn’t Grown On A Tree?


An example of a banana "tree" with green fruit.
Rsika/Wikimedia

Answer: Bananas

All kinds of delicious fruit are grown on trees like apples, oranges, pears, cherries, and more. Among the world’s most popular fruit (and despite the popular misconception), you won’t find bananas hanging from a tree.

While we might casually say bananas grow on a banana tree, and in pop culture it might be called a banana tree (such as in the 1960s pop hit Yellow Bird, Up High in Banana Tree), the banana tree, which bears a resemblance to a very stocky palm tree, isn’t a tree at all. The stocky trunk isn’t truly a woody trunk, but a pseudostem.

Despite its tall stature, the banana plant is actually a herbaceous flowering plant and the bananas it produces are berries. Despite being a berry, it’s nearly impossible to locate the seeds in modern bananas because—unlike their tough, seed laden, and nearly inedible wild-growing distant relatives—they’ve been carefully and selectively bred over time to reduce the seeds to tiny specs within the greater fruit.





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