I wanted to engage with your comment because you’ve got some good stuff in here but maybe some things that require clarification.

In their native habitat, surrounded in the natural conditions in which they and their pollinator evolved, these plants grow to enormous sizes and bloom just fine on a regular basis (usually annually or bi-annually).

So this one is like, yes, somewhat, and maybe/ we don’t entirely know. So I didn’t mention this in the post but I’ve been doing the work of finding and collecting Vanilla from around the islands over this time. Its all either V. planifolia or V. tahitiensis if you believe there to be two species and that its not actually just two varieties/ an artifact of colonialism. But the basic story goes that Vanilla planifolia (or tahitiensis) was spread throughout the tropics during the early days of colonialism and while it only found production levels in Tahiti and Madagascar, its spread actually may have come earlier than the knowledge of how to pollinate it, or coincident with that knowledge.

So incidentally, if you know where to look, there are plantation ruins you can find where there are still vanilla plants growing. Likewise, there have probably been many more introduction events into our jungles since. So if you are paying attention, you’ll find vanilla growing “in the wild” here. And I have a few cultivars I maintain that I’ve collected searching for these kinds of situations. One is 100% from an old plantation, and another is from an off the grid homestead a Mexican family had built up in the 1970’s. Now both of those locations, the vanilla is growing totally unmanaged and has been for decades, if not the better part of a century. And yes, its enormous, it grows 30-60 meters up to the top of the canopy. However, thats not to say that much smaller vanilla plants aren’t “fully mature”. The plant doesn’t need to reach these great heights to be considered fully mature. Its more similar to banana or ginger where you might have any where from 18-36 months to be considered a “mature” flowering node. But I think we really don’t have the data on that to say either here nor there.

What I can say is that typically vanilla flower “on the down”, which is that the basic pattern is for the plant to grow straight up; its very very apically dominant and only wants to grow “up”. But once it gets to the top of the canopy it might get knocked down by wind or a branch falling, and you end up with a vine where the node-internode-node pattern gets inverted. And thats often where you see the flowering. In Mexico, I expect this to be related to high wind events/ hurricanes. Big wind event comes through, trashes a bunch of jungle, and the plants respond by going “oh fuck we gotta breed”. But I wouldn’t agree with the statement that these plants aren’t “fully mature”. Its just not a correct conception of the vanilla lifecycle, and a 6 ft fine could be just as fully mature as a 60 foot vine.

Now in terms of flowering, and I’m literally meeting with another researcher about this later this week, I also think this is a woefully understudied aspect of vanilla biology.

These are some figures for a publication I’m working on related to vanilla growth.

Being a scientist and a vanilla grower, my partner and I have taken care to do things in a manner where we can draw certain conclusions. The above is a growing degree day model we’ve developed for vanilla growth as an estimating tool to compare different climates. We’d like to do the same for flowering, but as far as we can tell, no one has done so yet. SO maybe stay tuned. We’re meeting with a researcher this week from South florida who does publish on vanilla and we’re looking to collaborate.

They’re bee pollinated.