Indoor Banana Tree

If you want to keep an indoor banana tree, you can have your pick among a wide range of different species and variants. If you want to keep reasonably small indoor banana tree, you can for instance go for the Chinese Dwarf Banana (Musella lasiocarpa). This is quite a distant relative to the bananas we commonly encounter in the grocery store and will grow like a shrub rather then form tall pseudostems.

The Chinese Dwarf Banana is famous for its big, butter-yellow flowers and is commonly referred to as the Chinese Yellow Banana or the Golden Lotus (since it is somewhat similar to a water lotus). The flower has also been compared to an artichoke and the bloom can continue for months under the right conditions. The foliage of this plant is of a grayish-green shade and the entire plant – leaves, steams and bracts included – is decorated with a red tinge. The stalk can reach a height of 5-6 feet

The Chinese Dwarf Banana is not a strict indoor banana tree, not even in temperate parts of the world. Since it hails from mountainous parts of the Yunnan province in China, it is very cold hardy and the rhizome can survive winters where the air temperature goes far below 0° C as long as it is protected by a heavy layer of mulch. Due to its limited size, it has grown to be a popular indoor banana tree. It will rarely exceed 6 feet in height, which makes it a dwarf compared to most other banana variants.

The Chinese Dwarf banana can no longer be found wild in the Chinese mountains and its undomesticated ancestor is believed to have gone extinct centuries ago. Chinese gardeners have kept it alive in their gardens and the banana is today considered to be one of the most sacred and highly regarded flowers in Southern China. Just like most other domesticated bananas, the Chinese Dwarf Banana is normally grown from a bulb or sucker, not from seeds. This variety does however still produce seeds, but if growing it from a bulb or sucker is easier.

Regardless of whether you keep this banana variant as in indoor banana tree or plant it outdoors, the bananas will be small and most people dislike their taste. The bananas form beneath each bract on the stalk and rarely exceed 2 inches in length. The seeds are small, shiny and of a jet-black shade.