Taxonomy and nomenclature Д¬avendish bananas are a subgroup of the triploid ( AAA) group cultivars of Musa acuminata. With no fungicide effective against TR4, the Cavendish may meet the same fate as the Gros Michel.

ДЄfter years of attempting to keep it out of the Americas, in mid-2019, Panama disease Tropical Race 4 (TR4), was discovered on banana farms in the coastal Caribbean region. Contrary to this notion, in mid-2008, reports from Sumatra and Malaysia suggested that Panama disease had started attacking Cavendish cultivars. 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. Д¬avendish 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. These bananas are now known to belong to the Dwarf Cavendish cultivar. In 1888, bananas from the Canary Islands were imported into England by Thomas Fyffe. African bananas in turn were introduced from Southeast Asia into Madagascar by early Austronesian sailors. 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. The Chatsworth bananas were shipped off to various places in the Pacific around the 1850s.

For his work Paxton won a medal at the 1835 Royal Horticultural Society show. The plants were botanically described by Paxton as Musa cavendishii, after the Duke.

His head gardener and friend, Sir Joseph Paxton, cultivated them in the greenhouses of Chatsworth House. Though they were not the first known banana specimens in Europe, in around 1834 Cavendish received a shipment of bananas (from Mauritius) courtesy of the chaplain of Alton Towers (then the seat of the Earls of Shrewsbury). Д¬avendish bananas were named after William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire. The extreme lack of any biodiversity and the fact the Cavendish is planted in dense chunks in a monoculture without any other natural species or plants buffering them, means the Cavendish is extremely vulnerable to disease, fungal outbreaks, and genetic mutation possibly leading to eventual commercial extinction. Due to this the genetic diversity of the Cavendish banana is very low. They are unable to reproduce sexually, instead being propagated via identical clones.

They replaced the Gros Michel banana (commonly known as Kampala banana in Kenya and Bogoya in Uganda) after it was devastated by Panama disease. Since the 1950s, these cultivars have been the most internationally traded bananas. They include commercially important cultivars like ' Dwarf Cavendish' (1888) and ' Grand Nain' (the ' Chiquita banana'). The same term is also used to describe the plants on which the bananas grow. Cavendish bananas are the fruits of one of a number of banana cultivars belonging to the Cavendish subgroup of the AAA banana cultivar group.

Lisa banania