A couple of years ago, during our guerrilla gardening phase, we liberated a couple of four-foot banana plants from what was then the derelict house next door and is now the beautifully restored historic home of our friends Kevin and Matt. They're now fifteen feet high - the banana plants, that is, not the neighbours.
We assumed they were like all the other bananas in their garden: ornamental, with long-lasting pink flowers and small, inedible fruit.
But a couple of weeks ago, I was standing at the top of a ladder and pondering yet again how much my life had changed, pruning bananas instead of the roses on my allotment in London, when I realised that hidden among last year's fading leaves was a huge, pendant purple flower ringed by the beginnings of three dozen bananas.
It was the real McCoy, the edible variety. I'd always thought of them as a tropical crop, but our summers are hot enough and our winters sufficiently mild for them to bear fruit.
Now, the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is wander bleary-eyed into the garden in my bathrobe to see how they're progressing. They should be ready very soon.
I looked up bananas on the net and discovered that the trunk of the "tree" is actually made up of huge concentric layers of leaf sheaths. When the plant is ready to fruit, a true stem grows up through the middle and the flower grows on the end.
The garden is looking rather good at the moment. Just as in England, I've spent the winter months thinking my obsession with growing things has evaporated, and then all of a sudden the days aren't long enough to complete all the jobs we want to do. Everything happens like a speeded-up film here, with plants seemingly flowering whenever the mood takes them.
For example, we have a couple of bottlebrushes, one of my favourite shrubs. I also have a rather weedy one about three feet high in my garden in London, which puts out its scarlet brush-shaped flowers in July. Here, ours are about nine feet high, have flowered twice already this year, and should eventually become big, mature shade trees.
Our tomato plants are knee-high, and we're hoping they'll have borne at least some fruit before we go to London next month. Most varieties stop fruiting when the daytime temperature exceeds 90F and the night-time temperature stays above 75F, which is not too far off.
Otherwise, Kevin and Matt will get the tomatoes as a thank-you for watering them in our absence, and as a rather inadequate recompense for the theft of their banana trees.
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