The banana is a giant plant, which grows from an underground tem or rhizome, and dies after producing its fruit. What looks like a trunk is in fact made of the superimposed sheaths of the large leaves.
The leaves are very fragile. The fruit initially is a flowering growth on the top of the plant but after pollination, the female flowers develop into bananas. Since each stalk lives only for a year. It has no main root.
Hence the banana is a plant and not a tree. As soon as the fruit attains full maturity, the plant dries up and dies. But, the rhizome develops fresh shoots for growth of new banana plants.
Below Banana info from Wikipedia (Read More):-
Banana is the common name for a type of fruit and also the herbaceous plants of the genus Musa which produce this commonly eaten fruit. They are native to the tropical region of Southeast Asia. Bananas are likely to have been first domesticated in Papua New Guinea.[1] Today, they are cultivated throughout the tropics.[2]
Banana plants are of the family Musaceae. They are cultivated primarily for their fruit, and to a lesser extent for the production of fibre and as ornamental plants. As the banana plants are normally tall and fairly sturdy they are often mistaken for trees, but their main or upright stem is actually a pseudostem. For some species this pseudostem can reach a height of up to 2–8 m, with leaves of up to 3.5 m in length. Each pseudostem can produce a bunch of green bananas which when ripened often turn yellow or sometimes red. A variety was even recently discovered in a rainforest in Asia that turns purple. This then dies and is replaced by another pseudostem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_tree
