A banana is an elongated, edible fruit – botanically a berry – produced by several kinds of large herbaceous flowering plants in the genus Musa. In some countries, bananas used for cooking may be called "plantains," distinguishing them from dessert bananas. The fruit is variable in size, color, and firmness but is usually elongated and curved, with soft flesh rich in starch covered with a rind, green, yellow, red, purple, or brown when ripe. The fruits grow in clusters hanging from the top of the plant. The banana plant is the largest herbaceous flowering plant.
In botany, a fruit is a seed-bearing structure in flowering plants formed from the ovary after flowering.
Fruits are how flowering plants disseminate their seeds. Edible fruits, in particular, have long propagated using the movements of humans and animals in a symbiotic relationship that is the means for seed dispersal for the one group and nutrition for the other; in fact, humans and many animals have become dependent on fruits as a source of food.