The stalk that bloomed will eventually die (probably this winter) but plenty of pups will come up at the base. Each stalk is an individual plant.

You can eat the bananas but they won't taste like a regular banana, they'll be stringy and waxy with a bunch of seeds.

Musa basjoo is a type of banana cultivated for fiber, not for fruit.

This is the only one of my trees that has ever given fruit.
I have many of these around the back of the house and they
stay in the ground all year, come up late , but always come back. This one was just a pup last year.
Do they need special treatment or what may have caused only this one to fruit?
Is the fiber from the trunk what is useful?

The normal behavior is for a stalk old enough to have "pups" sprout around its base to be also old enough to bloom and fruit - but plants can't read so they don't always follow the rules. Usually one or two years worth of growth is all that it takes for bananas to reach maturity, it all depends on soil nutrition and how much water they get while growing. Though winter weather might freeze off the leaves the main part of the plant is still alive, so it isn't really starting over each year.

I believe they pound the fibers out of the leaves and the stalks. A lot of plants have long fibers, but only a few are strong enough or easy enough to process to be of any use for humans. In the tropics people use just about every part of banana plants - they eat the flowers and the fruit; they process the fibers from the stems and leaves and weave cloth and they use the leaves as everything from clothing to wrappers for food.

Thank you for the info! I am just so amazed at how these things grow here.

Mickey, all this pleasant warming trend (as some people like to call it) has Musa Basjoo overwintering now as far north as Rhode Island and Connecticut!

I've never cut my Musa Basjoo back every fall, like I probably should, and so instead of having the same stalk grow back every year (some of them do, sometimes), I generally have pups grow, in sort of a straight line in one direction from the original -- so my banana is creating a sort of horizontal row, because most of the old stalks come back.

This year, with all the rain (and the increasing cost of water), I didn't even do any watering, and they still did OK -- not as well as past years, but not bad. I agree, pretty amazing, considering my back yard is nothing like a "tropical rain forest."
Jeff