Library Shrub Has Gone Bananas

A tree may grow in Brooklyn, but bananas are growing in Toms River.

Ocean County Library patron William Gumper of Holiday City at Berkeley donated a banana tree to the library headquarters on Washington Street three years ago.

He’s watched and waited to see what would happen. Recently he pushed aside some of the leaves and found a stalk of small bananas growing there.

“It’s a miracle. I never thought we’d grow bananas in New Jersey,’’ the retired New York City cop told the county’s freeholders.

“I promote bananas but I don’t want to care for them,’’ he confessed. He’s given plants to the Windjammer Motor Lodge in Seaside Park, and the Crystal Diner at Routes 37 and 166 in Toms River, but has no reports of those trees bearing fruit.

The fruit bearing tree, he says it’s actually a shrub, is on the second floor of the library headquarters, near the bathrooms.

The bananas are the small variety, he explained, the ones that are “terribly overpriced,’’ in supermarkets.