If this is the same plant, a lady in my violet club has Gillian. She brought it to a meeting for show and tell. It was a beautiful plant with large white flowers and she said it lives on a side table under a regular reading lamp (think beside her sofa) and she said it hasn't stopped blooming in months. She had rooted babies from a leaf and gave me one. Mine is a small plant that hasn't yet bloomed but it has not had suckers either. I do have some mini plants that all they seem to do is sucker and I don't get much bloom from them...as they are small, it is hard to keep up with cutting the suckers off. Also recently I bought an evergrace at Lowes, it was loaded with bloom and I got 5 good sized suckers from it that I potted up for plants and several more that were just small and I tossed in trash. Maybe it being a space violet? I think some variety plants just sucker more than others and the suckers take the strengh of the plant to grow so less energy goes to blooming. It does take a little time for a sucker to root and grow enough to bloom. Hope it works out for you. tish

Quote: "Then it does not explain the large variation in size and vigor experienced by different growers of musa basjoo?" You wrote a statement but put a question mark. I don't understand what you mean. Some musa, for example "bordelon", "rose", a few others do throw many suckers. At least in my soil and weather conditions. Until a sucker gets to a certain size, it is drawing nutrition from the mother plant. Even when fully grown, many pups all in a small area (one mat) all are in competition trying to draw water and nutrients from the same patch of soil. So they would indeed be less vigorous than a less-freely-suckering variety (unless you worked to remove excess suckers). And yes, profuse suckering will reduce the size and number of fruit produced as compared to keeping just a single fruiting "mother" plant with a half size "daughter" and a just emerging "grand daughter." But that is a whole different question. You did not ask how to get the highest fruit production out of a mat. It does take maintenance to keep production up, like almost any crop. Old, untended areas of bananas are often thick with plants but lacking any fruit. That isn't because they were water suckers. That is because any given area of land can hold only so many roots and those roots have to feed and hydrate more plants. It comes down to making the decision about your goals. Are you trying to fill a corner of your yard behind the swimming pool with tropical plants to achieve "the look" of being in some tropical lagoon? Let them pup! Got one getting too close to the deck? Cut the pup off and give it away or trade. OTOH are you trying to have a plant grow, bloom, and produce the maximum fruit in the least time? Limit pups to one daughter and one grand daughter. Since a sword sucker is competing for light beneath its mother (hence its fast upward growth with limited energy put into leaf growth), it will be ready to produce a larger bunch of fruit sooner. Thus if you were to choose which pup to let grow for next year's crop and which pup to cut out and toss into the composter, you leave the sword and cut out the water sucker. Basjoo are popular in northern states because they are pretty hardy and provide that tropical look. They don't produce edible fruit so trying to get one to fruit is more of an academic exercise than trying to get yummy for the tummy. Might as well let them clump!

"It was my understanding that the lack of vigor lasts a long time, if not forever." Water suckers may take a year or more (depending on factors such as climate, soil, the way they were formed on the original root system, etc) to become established, but, once established, should become a normal plant with the same qualities as plants originating from sword leaf suckers. Again, the genetics are the same; it's just that the sword leaf suckers get a large head start in life. I just googled 'water suckers banana' and this link from discussions at bananas.org popped up as the first result. The quote from an ag professor in the first post seems to agree with what I described. Once the plant becomes established and starts producing offsets (no longer considered first generation), it becomes equivalent to a plant originating from a sword leaf sucker. Here is a link that might be useful: See Professor's Quote

Anyway there is a variable in my system which makes a conclusion impossible: 1. the ENS only has a stem diameter of about 1 cm. The main vine is about 4 cm.