Bananas come from a herbaceous plants, not trees, that look like a palms but are not palms. Capable of reaching a height of 30 feet but generally much shorter than that, these plants have stalks made of leaves that overlap one another like a celery not woody trunks like trees. As the plant grows the leaves sprout from the top of the plant like a fountain, unfurl and drop downwards like palm fonds.
A typical banana plant has 8 to 30 torpedo-shaped leaves that are up to 12 feet long and 2 feet wide. New leaves growing up from he center of the plant force the older leaves outward, enlarging the stalk. When a stalk is fully grown, it is from 8 to 16 inches thick, and soft enough to be cut with a bread knife.
After the leaves unfurl, the banana's true stem---a green, fibrous extrusion, with a softball-size magenta bud at the end---emerges. As the stem grows the cone-shaped bud at the top weighs it down. Petal-like bracts grow between the overlapping scales surrounding the bud. They fall away, revealing clusters of flowers. Oblong fruit emerge from the base of the flowers. The tips of the fruit grow towards the sun, giving bananas their distinctive crescent shape.
Each plant produces a single stem. Banana clusters that grow from the stem are called "hands." Each stem contains six to nine hands. Each hand contains 10 to 20 individual bananas called fingers. Commercial banana stems produces six or seven hands with 150 to 200 bananas.
A typical banana plant grows from a baby to the size in which the fruit are harvested in nine to 18 months. After the fruit is removed the stalk dies or is cut down. In its place one of more “daughters” sprout as suckers from the same underground rhizome that produced the mother plant. The suckers, or sprouting corms, are genetic clones of the parent plant. The brown dots in ripe bananas are undeveloped ovules that are never fertilized by pollination. The seeds never develop.