Ooh, and it looks like Musella lasiocarpa may be bee pollinated, not bat pollinated?
That’s fantastic news! That might mean it can be successfully landraced outside of its native climate without needing to hand pollinate it!
But you definitely have experience with bananas. Have you noticed any pollinators visiting your Musa and/or Ensete flowers? Bees or moths or hummingbirds, etc.? It would be nice if they can be pollinated by something in my ecosystem, too. 
My memory is of bees visiting the flowers, but it’s been a while. I usually have a lot of pollinators around because I let so many things flower and don’t use any poisons.
Visiting some literature I see that the fruit is listed as bitter and astringent, but the fruit in the photo was definitely sweet. Unfortunately, this plant, and its offspring are gone. Obviously the parent died after blooming, but the pups unexpectedly died a couple years later, after having grown for a decade and bloomed half a dozen times over the years. I’m not sure what happened, but probably should have taken more care of it than I did. I planted the seeds, of course, but many of them turned out to be hollow, and germination was poor. Those that did come up didn’t survive the winter in the cool greenhouse where the parent usually overwintered–it should have occurred to me that they might be more tender as seedlings.
Awww. 
Maybe it wasn’t very self-fertile, and wanted a pollination partner. Or maybe your local pollinators didn’t do as effective a job of pollinating it as its native pollinators would have?
You’ve definitely convinced me that’s a species to try. Maybe the reports of the fruit being bitter and astringent come from people who tried to eat the fruit before it was ripe?
What are your experiences with Ensete bananas? Are there any species that seem to have fruit worth eating?
It looks like I bought my Musella in 2003 from a horticulturist back East. No telling where it originated or whether there was anything unique about it. I didn’t actually save seed from all of the fruit–much of it rotted with the bananas. Since the plant pups so prolifically, it didn’t occur to me that there was a lot of value in the seeds. Some of the other bananas may have had a greater rate of seed viability.
Ensete on the other hand does not produce adventitious sprouts from the corm, so when it blooms, the whole thing dies with no replacement. For that reason, I’ve never let it bloom. When it gets really big I tend to chop it up at the end of the season and make new ones.
I’ve always heard that Ensete fruit is bitter and inedible, but I’ve never seen it. In Ethiopia they have domesticated Ensete to eat the starchy corm, but I think they ferment it. They don’t let it fruit, either.
Heh, well, if you ever have Musaceae seeds (or seeds from anything else in the Zingiberales family!) that you don’t feel like growing yourself someday, I enthusiastically volunteer to take them off your hands. 
Interesting! If most people don’t let Ensete bananas fruit, and most therefore don’t save seeds, it seems quite likely there’s a lot of potential for breeding edible bananas in that genus that is being ignored. Musa has been well-bred for ages and is full of amazingly delicious fruit that I totally want, but . . . maybe Ensete has some neat things to offer, too! We just need to look for them.
My goodness, wouldn’t that be cool if starting with another genus could wind up creating new delicious fruit that would thrive in slightly different growing conditions? More options available for everybody! 
I had no idea there were so many kinds of bananas. Those I see occasionally here in SE IN are sometimes winter hardy, but they don’t make bananas. My niece has gotten little bananas on hers, but she takes them inside in winter.
When I have planted hers in my garden, starting out at a couple feet tall they end up eight feet or more at end of season. Granted a leaf itself might be three feet or more, not counting the stem. They are the same thing, but hers don’t get that big, maybe because she keeps them in pots? I wish I knew what kind or species they are, but I don’t.
Besides the above two that we were discussing (Ensete and Musella), most bananas you’ll run into are the true banana plant, Musa, usually acuminata, and polyploid. There are a lot of varieties/cultivars, though, which are reproduced clonally due to the sterility (because we want fruit, not big woody seeds, in the peel). Musa basjoo, the fiber banana, is one of the most common hardier versions of these, though it doesn’t produce good fruit, either. Zone pushers are always chasing hardier versions of the culinary types, which ought to exist given the many high altitude species, but probably have lacked selection for lack of interest/need where they grow. Induction of female sterility to get enough pulp to eat is poorly understood, too, from what I understand.
There’s also Musa velutina, a species I am very interested in. It’s pretty popular as an ornamental, so it’s not hard to find, and it has seeds and edible fruits that apparently taste pretty good — they just happen to have very little flesh and a huge number of seeds. That’s something that could easily be a trait to breed for improving. It also grows only about 5-7 feet tall, which seems promising to raise the chances of being able to get fruit from it in the same year as planting the seed.
I have the same goal for bananas that you have with sweet potatoes, Mark — they’d be amazing as a seed-grown annual! And you can take credit for inspiring me to want to do that, too — it was following your years of effort transforming sweet potatoes into a seed-grown annual population that made me think, “I want to do the same thing with bananas!”
Sadly, I’ve been told that Musa basjoo is infertile and doesn’t make seeds, which is very disappointing. I was hoping so much that I’d be able to cross it with some other Musa species in order to get some of that excellent cold hardiness into a population . . . but it seems a lot of other people have had the same idea and no one has ever succeeded yet. It would be such a nice species to breed, if only it were possible to breed it!
There are likely a lot of alpine species out there more suitable. Musa itinerans and sikkimensis are more recent areas of focus, but I suspect there are more that haven’t been well-researched in the wild.
Personally, I’ve found them to be difficult to establish here. I’ve never managed to overwinter M. itinerans, even in the greenhouse. But many people are excited by it and there have been hybrids of these species that are available for purchase.
Musa sikkimensis is another species I see a lot of promise in. I’m also very interested in Musa balbisiana, one of the ancestors of our popular seedless bananas — they’re said to be less sweet than Musa acuminata, but a whole lot more cold tolerant, and also more drought tolerant. A pure Musa balbisiana landrace would have a lot of promise.
