The vanilla plant is a vine with short, oblong, dark green leaves. The flowers are quite large and beautiful with white, green, greenish, yellow or cream colors. The life of the flower is almost as brief as a firefly’s unless the plant is fertilised early in the morning. Vanilla flowers carry both male (anther) and female (stigma) organs separated by a membrane. The flowers are pollinated by stingless bees, Melipona, which come primarily for the nectar. The fruit is an elongate, fleshy seed pod between 10-20 cm long. When immature, the bean is dark green in colour and starts yellowing when it is ripe. Ripe vanilla will be harvested and cured to encourage the vanillin to be developed by enzyme action on the glucosides in the beans.

 

The vanilla plant is native to Mexico. It is now widely grown throughout the tropics in the Indian Ocean and French Polynesia. The top vanilla producers are Madagascar, Indonesia, Mexico, Comoros, Tonga and Tahiti.

 

 

Vanilla was discovered by Hernando Cortes in the 1500s in Mesoamerica. In 1703, Father Plumier baptised this plant and gave it the name Vanilla. The Spanish were the first to import vanilla plants into Europe. The plants were infertile after they arrived in Europe because of the absence of Melipona bees.

 

In 1848, a 12 year-old slave in Réunion (a French island just east of Madagascar), Edmond Albius, stumbled upon a way to fertilise the flower. Using a bevelled sliver of bamboo to fold back the membrane separating the anther and the sigma, one presses the anther onto the stigma - the flower is then self-pollinated and will produce a fruit. This simple and efficient method is still being used until this day.