This banana palm plant growing in Vancouver was cut down at the end of November 2025 before our winter got going, thereby preventing winter rot, caused by a fungal disease in the soil. Had the banana leaves fallen with the cold weather, they would have created the perfect warm and moist environment for the fungus to get established.
The four pseudostems show how the banana leaves wrap around the central core and then around each other. Take a look at ScienceDirect’s article about how much more useful this plant’s fibre could be in the food processing industry.[1]
Seeing inside these false stems makes it clear that banana palms are not trees. Why not? Because they have no wood, no lignin, none of the complex polymer that allows trees to stand up straight and grow tall.
Now let’s look at the inside story of wood. Near English Bay, about a third of a tree had fallen and then been cut up to be less hazardous. So, I went over to take photos of the cut ends.
This photo shows where three branches came together out of one larger branch. But then it is easier to see all the elements inside a tree in another even larger branch. From the outside in, there is bark, cambium, sapwood, heartwood, and finally pith.
Oh, and this larger branch seems to have two areas of pith. It would have been growing two branches.
Bark on the outside of a tree trunk is dead. The bark on the inside is still living.
Cambium is the active area inside a trunk. It is comprised of phloem nearest the bark, on the outside—notice the two Os—and xylem on the inside. Phloem transports food from the leaves to the roots. When farmers make maple syrup, they tap into the phloem and harvest sugar maple sap and then reduce all that liquid down to the maple syrup we like on hotcakes. Xylem is the hydrator engine of the tree—notice the two Ys—carrying water from the soil back up to the leaves.
Sapwood is just inside the xylem and, as the tree ages, it becomes heartwood.
Heartwood, regardless of its romantic name, is dead wood. It’s that stuff we make two-by-fours out of. We age a tree by counting its annual growth rings in both sapwood and heartwood. And in some trees, we can also see the medullary rays at right angles to the growth rings. They carry water and nutrients horizontally and in some wooden products, they provide the shimmery lines that are so appealing.
Pith is how the tree began life as a seedling and sometimes, in an older tree, that part of the tree has become hollow with age
The photograph also shows lines from the chainsaw that cut the tree. We can ignore those.
Woodcarving instructor and author Everett Ellenwood offers an article on the anatomy of wood and why it helps to understand it before carving.[2] When I, Nina, led a tree-identification walk around Brock House for its society’s members last year, I was intrigued to learn they have an active woodworking shop, teaching woodworking to those members who are interested.
I returned later for Brock House’s summer fair and was thrilled to buy a turned bowl of the wood of a Persian silk tree, also known as hardy mimosa, and scientifically as Albizia julibrissin.
My turned bowl features shimmery medullary rays, so appealing, almost as appealing as the flowers of this beautiful tree.[3]
[1] www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/pseudostems
[2] https://woodcarvingillustrated.com/anatomy-of-wood/
[3] I took this photograph in August one year.