Come to Ninh Thuan to hear the tearful love story of Lonely Banana.
The story of the banana species that refuses to "give birth"
The evening in Phuoc Binh National Park is quiet and cool, with the chirping of insects mixed with the rustling of the wind through the leaves. In this space, there is nothing more interesting than listening to a romantic love story.
With a steady, deep voice, imbued with the maturity of a man who has experienced many ups and downs in life, Mr. Nguyen Anh Tuan (51 years old), a National Park officer, told us about the tearful love story of a young couple, which ended with the formation of a tree species - the Lonely Banana.
Phuoc Binh is a highland commune of Bac Ai district, 70 km from Phan Rang provincial capital. It is surrounded by mountains covered with green forests. In the dry season, when they have free time from farming, the Raglai people in Phuoc Binh commune often go upstream, crossing cool streams, hills full of wild flowers to the forest to find a strange banana variety that the locals call the Lonely Banana.
And the story of the formation of this banana species is also one of the notes in the "Phuoc Binh love song" inviting tourists to come to this land of many strange things.
From germination to flowering, the lonely banana refuses to produce seedlings.
Anh Tuan said, long ago, there was a pair of childhood friends. When they grew up, they fell in love and vowed to be together until their hair turned white and their teeth fell out.
Before the couple's wedding day, the girl's parents suddenly forced their daughter to break her engagement because they discovered that the future groom had many strange diseases. Knowing the news, the groom's family, out of pride, also determined to prevent their son from marrying the girl. Loving each other but unable to be together, the couple decided to escape to the forest to live a free life, without any constraints.
Unexpectedly, after a few days of running away, the young man fell seriously ill, his limbs were swollen and blistered. Seeing himself like that, the young man cried and blamed himself for making his lover suffer.
After finding a safe place on the cliff for the girl, the boy left. When she woke up in the morning and did not see her lover, the girl thought he had gone into the forest to find food like usual, not knowing that she would never see her lover again.
As time passed, the girl still waited for her lover to return with the pregnancy growing day by day. Finally, she decided to go looking for the boy but the result was hopeless.
One day, she decided to go to the bottom of the abyss and suddenly discovered someone's body. After a moment of panic, she recognized the necklace of her lover. It turned out that he had committed suicide to free himself from physical pain.
Too sad when her lover was no longer in this world, after giving birth, the girl also died of exhaustion and turned into a strange banana tree, with green banana flowers growing in the middle of the sacred forest.
Later, a local brought a banana tree home to plant and found that it did not produce seedlings but only produced ripe fruit and then died on its own. The banana tree lived its entire life alone, so people called it the lonely banana.
Banana flowers are green, very large, bear few fruits but many seeds.
Special medicine of Raglai people
According to Mr. Tuan, the lonely banana, also known as the orphan banana, lotus banana, Phuoc Binh seed banana... usually grows in high mountainous areas. The tree only regenerates by seeds. From germination to flowering, there is only one mother tree, not giving birth to offspring like normal bananas. And we have to wait until the fruit is ripe and plump, the mother tree wilts and dies, ending a lonely life, then the banana seeds that fall to the ground will germinate into offspring, forming new life.
The Lonely Banana can grow up to over 2 m tall, with the largest part of the trunk being about 0.3 m in diameter, tapering towards the top, with large and thick leaves. The tree has a double trunk, light green with a white wax coating. The flowers are green, very large like a blooming lotus.
Each tree produces a single bunch of round, tightly packed fruit.
Each tree produces a single bunch, the large bunch has 6 - 8 bunches, the small bunch has 6 - 7 bunches, the round fruit lies tightly together.
When the bananas begin to ripen and turn yellow, the leaves and stems gradually dry up and die, all the nutrients are concentrated in the fragrant ripe banana bunch. The solitary banana has many black seeds, as big as the tip of an index finger.
The tragedy that separated the couple in the story was due to illness. And so, when the girl transformed into a "lonely" banana tree, she left behind this plant's miraculous healing ability.
Mr. Tuan said that for the Raglai people in the mountainous commune of Phuoc Binh, the lonely banana tree is a medicine used in daily life. All parts of the banana tree have medicinal properties. The stem, leaves, and tubers are used to treat diabetes, while the seeds and fruits are used to treat kidney stones.
Depending on the specific disease, people use different ingredients from the banana tree to treat it.
For the Raglai people in the mountainous commune of Phuoc Binh, the lonely banana is a panacea.
Phuoc Binh people also tell each other that when growing a bunch, the mother banana tree sacrifices its most quintessential parts - the nutrients in the roots, stems and leaves - to concentrate on ripening the bananas, to give life delicious bananas, and that is why bananas have the most useful effects. When ripe, bananas will give off a fragrant aroma, have a sweet taste, and many seeds. When bitten, the seeds will have an astringent taste, and those seeds are used to treat diseases.
When the banana season comes, people go to the forest to find and cut banana bunches, put them in baskets and bring them home, peel them and dry them, or bring them to the stream and use a sharp knife to separate all the white flesh, and sift out the seeds.
Each ripe bunch can separate 2 - 2.5 kg of seeds, large bunches can sometimes have 3 kg of seeds. Inside the seeds is white powder, Raglai people consider it a medicine used to treat kidney stones, improve health.
Raglai people also often use banana seeds to boil water to drink or soak in rice wine to drink regularly to treat kidney disease, edema, back pain, aching bones and joints, weak kidneys, kidney stones, stimulate digestion...
Banana seeds can cure many diseases.
Children with constipation can take a ripe banana and bury it in the fire. When the skin turns black and the flesh is soft, take it out and let it cool. Feed it to the child. After about ten minutes, the child will have a bowel movement.
Phuoc Binh people still pass down the method of roasting dried banana seeds until golden brown, burying them in the ground, and then soaking them in rice wine for 3 months and 10 days to produce a wine with a golden color similar to Chivas. Ninh Thuan people call this banana wine with the luxurious name "Chivas Phuoc Binh".
In addition to making medicine and soaking in wine, people in the highlands of Phuoc Binh also use banana buds and banana tree trunks to cook soup, hot pot or prepare rustic dishes, combining wild vegetables and stream fish available in nature.
For local people, the lonely banana is like a precious gift that nature has given them. Growing the banana species named lonely also increases the income of the people in Phuoc Binh commune, creating income, helping people have a new direction to develop agricultural economy, limiting deforestation and exploitation of forest products.
On the market, currently, dried Phuoc Binh bananas with unpeeled flesh cost 50,000 - 60,000 VND/kg; while dried seeds cost 80,000 - 120,000 VND/kg, depending on quality.
To avoid overharvesting, recently, Phuoc Binh National Park has collected wild banana seeds from the forest and brought them back to the nursery for research and breeding for conservation.
Some farmers in Phuoc Binh commune have been transferred breeding techniques to grow bananas on upland land. Up to now, many households have successfully grown them, bringing in a stable source of income.
In 2015, in order to determine the composition of substances in banana seeds and their medicinal effects, the Department of Science and Technology of Ninh Thuan cooperated with the Ginseng and Medicinal Materials Center of Ho Chi Minh City to collect samples of banana seeds to analyze their chemical composition.
According to research by the Ho Chi Minh City Ginseng and Medicinal Materials Center, Phuoc Binh banana seeds contain many compounds such as Saponin, coumarin, flavonoid..., which have anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, pain-relieving effects, help prevent cancer, support anxiety disorders, and provide many nutrients for the user's nervous system.
Currently, the lonely banana tree is one of 25 medicinal plants that Ninh Thuan province is prioritizing for large-scale development.
An Yen - Nhu Thua - Nguyen Gia
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