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Vanilla is definitely not plain. In fact, it's full of surprises. For instance, says economic botanist Pesach Lubinsky, a wild vanilla orchid flower "actually smells like cinnamon." Then there’s pollination. Only one Central American bee is thought to do it; everywhere else people move the pollen by hand.
Most vanilla today grows in Madagascar, oceans away from that bee. Vanilla took off in Europe in the 1600s, after the Spanish brought beans back from Mexico. But no one outside the New World could get it to bear fruit until 1841, when a slave on the island of Réunion worked out the hand-pollination technique still used today.
The most cultivated species is Vanilla planifolia (above). The runner-up is Vanilla tahitensis, or Tahitian vanilla, which has never been seen in the wild. Last year Lubinsky used DNA to determine that it's a hybrid of two other species, probably brought together by Maya growing flavoring for chocolate. It rode on Spanish galleons to the Philippines, then to Tahiti with the French—just part of vanilla’s world tour. —Helen Fields
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