Cavendish banana

Cavendish
A bunch of Cavendish bananas
Species	Musa acuminata
Cultivar group	Cavendish subgroup of the AAA Group
Cultivar group members	See text

A Cavendish banana is the fruit of a banana cultivar belonging to the Cavendish subgroup of the AAA cultivar group. The same term is also used to describe the plants on which the bananas grow.

They include commercially important cultivars like 'Dwarf Cavendish' and 'Grand Nain'. Since the 1950s, these cultivars have been the most internationally traded bananas, replacing the Gros Michel banana after crops of the latter were devastated by Panama disease.

Cavendish bananas were named after William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire. Though they were not the first known banana specimens in Europe, in around 1834 Cavendish received a shipment of bananas (from Mauritius) courtesy of the chaplain of Alton Towers (then the seat of the Earls of Shrewsbury). His gardener, Sir Joseph Paxton cultivated them in the greenhouses of Chatsworth House. The plants were botanically described by Paxton as Musa cavendishii, after the Duke.

The Chatsworth bananas were shipped off to various places in the Pacific around the 1850s. It is believed that some of them may have ended up in the Canary Islands, though other authors believe that the bananas in the Canary Islands had been there since the fifteenth century and had been introduced through other means, namely by early Portuguese explorers who obtained them from West Africa and were later responsible for spreading them to the Caribbean. African bananas in turn were introduced from Southeast Asia into Madagascar by early Austronesian sailors. In 1888, bananas from the Canary Islands were imported into England by Thomas Fyffe. These bananas are now known to belong the Dwarf Cavendish cultivar.