Dwarf Cavendish

Musa acuminata 'Dwarf Cavendish'
A 2 year old Dwarf Cavendish Banana Tree
Species	Musa acuminata
Cultivar group	Cavendish subgroup of the AAA Group
Cultivar	'Dwarf Cavendish'
Origin	Canary Islands

The Dwarf Cavendish banana is a widely grown and commercially important Cavendish cultivar. The name "Dwarf Cavendish" is in reference to the height of the pseudostem, not the fruit. Young plants have maroon or purple blotches on their leaves but quickly lose them as they mature. It is one of the most commonly planted banana varieties from the Cavendish group, and the main source of commercial Cavendish bananas along with Grand Nain.

Cavendish bananas were named after William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire. Though not the first known banana specimens in Europe, at around 1834, Cavendish had received a shipment of bananas 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.