Time Line

1834 Cavendish bananas were named after William Cavendish, the sixth Duke of Devonshire. In this year, Cavendish received a shipment of bananas (from Mauritius) courtesy of the chaplain of Alton Towers (then the seat of the Earls of Shrewsbury). The chaplain's head gardener and friend, Sir Joseph Paxton cultivated them in the greenhouses of Chatsworth House, in Derbyshire

1820 The Grand Garden Conservatory is one of the (Alton Towers) garden's most iconic features. It was completed in this year. The Alton Towers Resort gardens originally took shape in 1810 as a pet project of the 15th Earl of Shrewsbury. He invited the best architects of the day to transform barren farmland into the beautiful gardens seen today.

1850s The Chatsworth bananas were shipped off to various places in the Pacific. It is believed that some of them may have ended up in the Canary Islands, though other authors believe that the bananas in the Canary Islands. In 1888, bananas from the Canary Islands were imported into England by Thomas Fyffe. These bananas are now known to belong to the Dwarf Cavendish cultivar.

1903 Cavendish bananas entered mass commercial production in 1903 but did not gain prominence until later when Panama disease attacked the dominant Gros Michel ("Big Mike") variety in the 1950s.