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Cavendish bananas are the fruits of banana cultivars belonging to the Cavendish subgroup of the AAA cultivar group. They include commercially important cultivars like the 'Dwarf Cavendish' and the '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. ==History of cultivation== 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. Cavendish bananas entered mass commercial production in 1903 but did not gain prominence until later when Panama disease attacked the dominant Gros Michel ("Big Mike") variety in the 1950s. Because they were successfully grown in the same soils as previously affected Gros Michel plants, many assumed the Cavendish cultivars were more resistant to Panama disease. Contrary to this notion, in mid-2008, reports from Sumatra and Malaysia suggest that Panama disease is starting to attack Cavendish-like cultivars. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Cavendish bananas」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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