
Placing the pollen on what appeared to be the stigma produced no results. Quoting from her book - "Hand pollination was a mystery. Home Orchid Growing, that there is a gimmick to pollinating Vanilla flowers. I had successfully pollinated some Cattleyas, but I knew from Mrs. No doubt the insect which does the job in nature needs this multiple opportunity almost as much as I did.

#VANILLA ORCHID PLANT TRIAL#
The continuing bloom gives time for trial and error in the effort to pollinate the flowers for Vanilla beans. Each flower opens for a day, but each day new flowers open and this continues for a period of six weeks to two months or more. Blooming time is similar to that of daylilies. It was yellow-green, more like an Easter lily in shape (though about one-quarter that size) with a nicely fringed lip and petals of good substance. We looked over the vine and found two more of these clusters, and by early May it was apparent that each one would have from 16 - 20 flower buds. Several times in the past few years we thought we had a flower, but it was only a new growth, so this year when a knob started to form at one end, about the third week in March, we didn't get excited until a definite ring of buds had formed around it. Vanilla planifolia, the commercial Vanilla species

There has been very little mention of Vanilla in the AOS Bulletin since we began receiving it, nearly eight years ago. (I am giving this history to explain that it probably wouldn't normally take the seven years it took us to get it to bloom.) We didn't know then if it could be bloomed at all in a greenhouse in our area. Eventually it became so tall that there was only one place in the greenhouse with sufficient headroom for it, and there it stayed, in an intermediate section where the night temperature is kept at 60 - 62F. We were happy when it started to grow, but since it would be a long time before it was big enough and old enough to flower, it was moved from time to time to where it wouldn't be in the way of plants that were expected to flower. When we learned from our first book on orchids that Vanilla is an orchid, we thought it would be nice to have one, and when our green-house was up a year later, a piece of Vanilla vine was one of our first acquisitions.
