22-02-2018, 09:56 PM
On the attempted cultivation of banana etc. I'll quote a significant passage from TEXT AND ILLUSTRATIONS. DIOSCORIDES AND THE ILLUSTRATED HERBAL IN THE ARAB TRADITION by Michael J. Rogers (emphasis mine)
Quote:Abu’l-Khayr was a late-11th-century author who, Carabaza conjectures on the basis of internal evidence, was supervisor of the ‘Royal garden’ of the ruler al-Mu{tamid in 11th-century Seville. His work combines quotation from his predecessors, information from local professionals, and his own personal observation, and although it never appears to have been illustrated it doubtless presupposed illustrated works of other specific types. It seems to go back to a late Antique or Byzantine georgic or geoponic tradition, perhaps to the 6th-century Cassianus Bassus Scholasticus, or perhaps to a certain Qus¢ūs (possibly to a pseudo-Qus¢ūs, {Alī b. Muammad b. Sa{d), who re-worked Cassianus Bassus’s text. Abu’l-Khayr’s soubriquet, al-Shajjār (‘the Tree Man’) indicates that to his contemporaries and successors he was primarily an arboriculturalist, and the detailed account he gives of grafting suggests that he may have been involved in experimental development. He covers, variously, timber-cultivation to olive-growing, grape-growing and fig- growing, orchard trees and garden crops like bananas, and a physic garden, including simples such as the mandrake, thus all gradations from forestry, agriculture and pharmaceutical cultivation to floriculture. The other crops he describes include rice and wheat; vegetables; and garden fl owers, including roses, jasmine, carnations, narcissi, saffron, and irises or lilies of various colours. The text presents, however, a curious problem, that some of the plants and shrubs mentioned could never have been grown in Andalusia and were valued imports from tropical Southern Asia, notably myrobalans (Terminalia spp. Linn., a genus of tropical hardwoods, the fruit of which was used in tanning) and the Nux-Vomica tree (Strychnos Nux-Vomica).