Page 13 - Tropical glasshouses

15 Vanilla Vanilla planifolia On the central table in the warm orchid houses you can see some orchids climbing to a great height; these are all di erent species of vanilla. A number of these species provide vanilla pods. The best vanilla comes from Vanilla planifolia.
In the nineteenth century they discovered a way to pollinate vanilla owers by hand,
meaning that vanilla could be cultivated in regions without their natural pollinators, specialised bees.
The Hortus does not maintain this extensive collection exclusively for the vanilla pods, but also because a substance has been found in the plant that is e ective against
a particular disease. A group
of researchers, under the guidance of Dr Barbara Gravendeel and assisted by our sta , is trying to discover which species of vanilla is the most suitable for deriving the medicine; in the future these might be cultivated on a large scale in the Netherlands.
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