Ensete lasiocarpum Seeds | Wild Enset
LATIN NAME: Ensete lasiocarpum
COMMON NAME: Wild Enset
Plant Profile
For more than a century this species carried a genus of its own. Franchet described it in 1889 from material sent out of Yunnan, and because it held its inflorescence upright and ripened a dry fruit that split into valves, features no true banana shows, it was placed alone in the genus Musella. Molecular work later showed that the plant sits inside Ensete, the group of false bananas that includes the food enset of the Ethiopian highlands, and it is now written as Ensete lasiocarpum.
The inflorescence rises straight out of the crown rather than hanging down, and its yellow bracts stay firm and bright for a long spell, which is why the plant is grown in the tropics and warm temperate zones as a winter ornamental rather than only as a curiosity. The whole structure looks like an opened lotus, a resemblance that has earned it a place in temple ground. A plant flowers once, sets its fruit and dies, but by then it has produced offsets at the base that carry on.
Each leaf is a long blade with a distinct stalk, and the blade is broader relative to its length than the narrow paddle of a banana, with the midrib pale beneath.
The fruit of this species is a dry capsule, green ripening to yellow, that splits when ripe to shed a few hard black seed. A banana left to seed produces a soft berry packed with many small seed, so the dry fruit here is a genuine departure and one of the reasons the plant was once given its own genus. The seed coat is thick and impermeable, an adaptation that lets the seed wait through a cold or dry season before the seedling appears. Sow it fresh where you can, and soften the coat by soaking before sowing.
Science & Biotechnology
The plant is a stout herb with a fleshy pseudostem built from the sheathing bases of the leaves. Its chromosome complement is the clue to its new home: Ensete species carry eighteen chromosomes, while the true bananas are built on a higher count, so the transfer into Ensete agreed with what the cells had been saying all along.
The value of this species to researchers lies in its family. Its African relative is a staple starch crop whose pseudostem is scraped and fermented into a starchy food, and the agronomy of that crop has generated a large body of work on starch structure, on the enzymes that digest it. Because Ensete lasiocarpum is a close wild relative of that crop, it appears in phylogenetic work on the family and in studies of the soft, low-fibre starch held in the pseudostem, which differs in granule size and swelling behaviour from a potato starch.
Offsets are slow to appear and slow to reach planting size, and a young plant is slow to make a trunk thick enough to flower. Tissue culture through shoot tips has therefore been developed for the genus, producing multiple plants from one clean growing point, and the method is the standard route for building numbers of a specimen worth propagating.
Uses & Benefits
In the villages of south-west China the plant stands beside doorways and in temple courtyards, where its yellow crown reads as an offering of flowers during the season the rest of the garden is dull. The pseudostem is cut for pig feed, a use recorded across its range and consistent with the fodder value of the genus, and parts of the plant are used in local medicine. In the ornamental trade it is grown as a container specimen for a terrace, or planted out against a warm wall where frost is brief; the big leaves need space, since a mature plant spreads more than a metre and a half across.
Growing from Seed
Scarify the hard seed coat by rubbing it on sandpaper at one point and soak the seed in lukewarm water overnight before sowing. Use a mix of two parts loam-based compost, one part coarse sand and one part leaf mould, sow the seed about ten millimetres deep in a deep pot and keep it at about twenty-five degrees with high humidity, in a propagator or a warm frame; the chief causes of failure are a cold medium and a seed allowed to dry out again. Pot the seedling on as soon as it carries four leaves and it will not look back if the roots are handled gently.
Grow the plant in full sun for the strongest growth and water generously in summer, letting the surface of the compost dry only slightly between waterings. Feed monthly with a balanced liquid fertiliser and, in a container, move the plant up a pot size each spring. Space plants that are to stand in open ground about one and a half metres apart so that the leaves do not shade each other. Remove dead leaves at the base rather than pulling green ones, and cut the plant to the ground after it has flowered, leaving two of the strongest offsets. In winter keep the crown dry and protect the base with straw or bring the container into a cool, bright shed; wet cold harms this plant more than dry cold. Watch for mealybug in the leaf sheaths and spider mite on the underside of leaves kept under glass.
Our Take
Treat this plant as a long game: raise it in a container for its first seasons and give it a place at the front of a border where you can see the crown open. The scarlet-flowered Musa coccinea grows on the same schedule and takes the same shelter, and where the ground stays warm the tall cannas such as Canna indica will carry the border on into late summer. For a bold architectural effect around the yellow crown, plant the traveller’s palm, Ravenala madagascariensis, nearby, though it is the least tolerant of the three.
Related Reading
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