This is part of the Jamaican restaurant series. Barb has a friend, Becky, who owns the local Jamaican restaurant . He moved to a new location, in town. When she saw that his new walls were bare, she decided to decorate! Barb is usually a serious painter. With this series, she decided to take a much lighter hearted approach and to paint with abandon.

In her search of things Jamaican, Barb decided to do something with bananas. She discovered that the banana flower is HUGE —as large as a bunch of bananas in the store. She saw pictures of flowers with bananas above but where do the bananas come from? Days of research revealed that the small orange things – the flower’s pistols – were all bananas in the making. Once the pistols are fertilized and start to shrivel, they and the petal of the flower they are under starts to rise. The petal shrivels completely and drops off to get out of the way, and eventually the pistols – now starting to look like baby bananas, are pointing up. Meanwhile, the flower just keeps on unfurling new petals and new waves of bananas rise to join the bunch. We were entranced as the details of the mystery of banana reproduction were “unfurled” as it were.

So Barb set out to paint this. First she had nice yellow bananas. The kind she likes to eat. But as successive waves of people came to see the new work, and successive waves of people said “Bananas are green while the grow” the bananas became greener.

She says she does not know where the banana leaves in the background came from. But when Becky saw the picture, he exclaimed “You nailed it” and explained that the smooth green leaves of the banana plant get torn by the wind in storms.