Definitely. It would be really, really interesting to see if we can breed delicious bananas that start exhibiting traits like plants adapted to desert climates. Leaves with bit of a silvery tint, for instance (a natural sunscreen), or pseudostems or corms that store a lot of water (like a succulent), or just plain deeper roots, etc.
Corms that are far less prone to root rot, so they can handle big deluges of water and then nothing for awhile, would be particularly nice for any climate that gets a lot of its water during one part of the year and not during the rest. (Which seems to be true of many arid and semi-arid areas.)
One potentially interesting avenue to try would be collecting hardy gingers and cannas and seeing if we can cross those with bananas. They’re in the same order, which is not very closely related, but it’s close enough that a cross may be possible.
I’d rather cross banana species with each other, of course, but since syncing up flowering can be difficult, I like the idea of having gingers and cannas around to try some kind of cross between edible plants, any kind of cross, whenever only one banana plant is flowering. Gingers and cannas are supposed to flower for several months (midsummer until first frost), so in theory, they ought to have fresh pollen available for awhile. And, I mean, I’d like to grow them for their own sake anyway, so it’s not like it would be a burden to have them around.
My suspicion is that the best way to sync up flowering will be to have a lot of banana plants. When randomness plays a large role, a larger population size will help the chances of getting two at the same time. Then you could get initial crosses done.
Once we have even a few consistently fertile, cold hardy plants, then I think the project will start taking giant strides forward, because it’s likely that all the corms will start growing a fresh pseudostem during the same few weeks in late spring. Which may help them to flower at the same time.
Assuming we succeed in that, we may want to send some pups to people in warmer climates to make sure we haven’t inadvertently bred day length sensitivity into the population, since bananas are naturally day neutral, and that’s an appealing trait.
My current thinking is that I probably want to keep the initial parents in a greenhouse and protect them every winter (from the wet more than the cold, I’m starting to think), but put the seeds out into normal conditions, to see if some epigenetic adaptations can be triggered to help them do well without help here.
