Banana Trees

I have some friends who do landscaping and they were taking two banana trees out of someones yard at the end of summer. They hated to just throw them away but where could they find a place for two banana trees to spend the winter in New York? Me, jumping up and down like a maniac, Hello, I have a green house!

So these two huge banana trees show up and I find one pot big enough and another pot not quite big enough and we dragged them into the greenhouse and potted them up. I have no idea how we will ever move them!

The trees got through the potting shock and were doing great when we had the first serious cold spell. This was the perfect time for the heater in the greenhouse to quit. Of course it was a Friday night and when I looked into the greenhouse on Saturday morning I couldn't imagine what was going on. The banana trees were missing and all the other plants were black, as if there had been a fire or something. I went running in and it was freezing. The temp overnight had been down in the single digits.

I didn't know if the banana trees could possibly survive. The huge, red-green leaves that had been pointing to the sky were drooping, black, and brittle. With in a week each tree sent out a new leaf from the middle of the plant. I cut off all the old leaves and slowly new leaves have been coming up ever since. I should have taken picture of them after the freeze so I could really appreciate their amazing comeback but I didn't want to remember them like that if they didn't rebound.