A plant of the tropics. The banana was brought to New Zealand by early European settlers, planted in sheltered gardens in the warm north. Now it grows wild in old gardens, in waste places, in the corners of abandoned farms, a flash of green against the grey sky. The banana is not a true tree. It is a giant herb, its pseudostem made of overlapping leaf bases, reaching up to eight metres in height. The leaves are huge, up to three metres long, bright green and easily torn by the wind. The flowers are the story – a massive purple bud that opens to reveal rows of tiny flowers. The fruit is the prize – the banana, yellow and sweet, curved and soft, the taste of the tropics. In New Zealand, bananas are grown in the north, in Northland and Auckland and the Bay of Plenty. They escape from cultivation, spreading by underground rhizomes, forming clumps in old gardens and waste places. These wild bananas are living history, a reminder of the settlers who planted them, the gardens they made. The banana plant is short-lived. Each pseudostem fruits once, then dies. But new shoots rise from the rhizome, replacing the old, spreading across the garden. A banana clump might persist for decades, even after the house is gone, even after the garden is forgotten. To see a banana plant in fruit is to see a piece of history. The settlers who planted it are gone, but the plant remains. It fruits every year, sends up new shoots, spreads across the waste place. It does not know that it is a stranger here. It just grows, and fruits, and feeds the birds. The banana is not a native. It is not endemic. It is an immigrant, a settler, a plant that made a new home in a new land. It has been here for two hundred years. It will be here as long as the north stays frost-free.