Today's photograph is courtesy of Mary Farmer, aka miconia@Flickr (BPotD Flickr Group Pool | original image). Mary has diligently and expertly documented the development of flowers on the banana plant in her Panama backyard, using both photographs and words. I find the whole set of photographs fascinating, so I highly recommend spending the time to browse through them.
Mary expands her commentary on this banana plant and other Panamian plants she encounters in her weblog, A Neotropical Savanna. Again, well worth visiting, as she invites you along on her journey to learn about tropical plants.
Bananas and banana plants have previously been featured on BPotD here and here, so I won't repeat the excellent links contained in those entries today.
Photography resource link: Eric Fredine has updated his web site with photographs from his newest exhibition, Horizons. I briefly entertained the thought of flying to Edmonton to see the exhibit (he is one of my favourite photographers), but I thought it more environmentally-sensible to wait until circumstances necessitated a trip. The web exhibit will do for now!
The set on Flickr (link above), on development of flowers of banana plant, is really worth a look if you have any interest in or curiosity about this plant. I was in the Caribbean some years ago and walked through a banana plantation, and loved seeing the stages of development -- especially the unfolding and gradual turning-upwards of the developing banana hands. I was able to take with me a spent stalk after all the flowers/bananas had gone -- something like the last photo in the Flickr series (although that photo doesn't capture the details or the beauty of it).
Every element of this part of the plant was beautiful, from the purple, cone-shaped flower head at the tip, to the pattern left on the face of the structures where the banana hands had been attached. Here was something that typically would be dismissed and discarded as garbage. But when you stopped to really look at the details, it was gorgeous.