How vanilla reached Madagascar

Two branches of the genus Vanilla live side by side on the island. The 9 indigenous species belong to the palaeotropical branch. The vanillas the world cultivates, Planifolia, Tahitensis and Pompona, belong to the aromatic branch and all arrived by human hand. This account follows the first of them, the one that made the SAVA, along a route that begins in the humid forests of the Gulf of Mexico and passes through a heated glasshouse on the edge of London.

Madagascar already had its vanillas

Before any introduction, the genus Vanilla was present on the island. Botany records 9 indigenous species there, 7 leafless and 2 leafy, from the rocks of the north to the spiny thickets of the south. Two of them joined the list in 2023, described by a Malagasy and Reunionese team⁸.

These vanillas form the botanical ground of Madagascar. They flower for a few indigenous bees, fruit by exception, give their pods to the forest. Malagasy knowledge settled on their stems. We have given them a full article, the wild vanillas of Madagascar.

The plant that made the SAVA belongs to another lineage, from another continent. Its journey is what we follow here.

A vine from the Gulf of Mexico

Vanilla planifolia is a climbing orchid of Mesoamerican origin. Its cradle lies on the humid tropical face of the Gulf of Mexico, in the forests of Veracruz and their margins. It grows in the understorey, winds around a living support, climbs towards the light of the canopy and fruits in the shade.

It carries broad, thick leaves, which places it in a different branch of the genus from the leafless Malagasy species. It is a plant of hot, well-watered forest with a marked season, asking for shade at ground level and clarity above. This precise ecology explains why it found the north-east coast of Madagascar so welcoming, 3 centuries after its encounter with Europeans.

What the Maya, the Totonac and the Mexica did with it

Human use of vanilla long precedes its cultivation outside America. The oldest accounts point to the pre-Columbian Maya of south-eastern Mexico and Central America, where vanilla appears as a flavouring for the cacao beverage⁶. That is its founding historical use, in a liquid, bitter preparation, combined with other fragrant plants.

The Totonac of the Papantla region, in northern Veracruz, are held to be the first to have cultivated it⁶. They occupied precisely the area where V. planifolia is at home, which gave them access both to the plant and to its natural fruiting. Their culture grants the vine a sacred status. A Totonac origin story tells of a divine princess, Xanath, who turned herself into a vanilla vine to remain on earth, flowering each year to remind people of a sacred love. The plant was offered to the gods and used as a medicinal material⁹.

The Mexica, commonly called Aztecs, lived on the high plateaux, at an altitude where vanilla refuses to grow. They obtained it at the market, where a stall sold it alongside cacao¹¹. They called it tlilxochitl, rendered as black flower, a name that describes the cured pod rather than the flower itself, which is a pale green tending to yellow. The Totonac and the Maya gave it other names again, retraced in the article on where the name vanilla comes from. Vanilla went into xocolatl, a drink of ground cacao whipped to a foam, combined with chilli, ground maize, annatto or honey depending on the preparation. Bernardino de Sahagún, in the record he gathered in the 16th century from Nahua informants, describes these Mexica noble cacaos scented with tender vanilla⁹.

Two features of that use travelled with the plant. Vanilla is an infusion material there, tied to cacao from the outset. It belongs to the register of the sacred and of the table of the powerful before entering everyday cooking.

Vanilla enters European circuits in the wake of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and of the exchanges that now link New Spain to Europe. The taste crossed the Atlantic. Mastery of the cultivation stayed in Mexico. For close to 3 centuries the world supply remained in the hands of the gatherers and planters of Veracruz. In the mid and late 18th century the Totonac of the Papantla region were the only exporters of vanilla, a position that held for close to 100 years, carried by the quality of what they produced⁷.

Why vanilla stayed Mexican for 3 centuries

That Mexican exclusivity rests on a biological lock. The vanilla flower carries a partition, the rostellum, which separates the pollen from the stigma and reserves fertilisation for a visitor able to cross it. In its native range that visitor sometimes appears. Elsewhere the vine climbs, flowers magnificently, then stops there.

This lock held vanilla beyond the reach of the European colonies for a long time. Its lifting, around 1841 on Bourbon Island, opens everything that follows. That chapter is told in detail in vanilla is pollinated by hand.

The passage through European glasshouses

Before reaching the Indian Ocean, vanilla passes through an unlikely place for a tropical forest plant, a heated glasshouse in northern Europe. In the early 1800s a plant from the West Indies was grown in the glasshouse of Charles Greville, at Paddington near London. This specimen, known to botanists as the Blanford type, was described and then propagated by cuttings. Fragments left from there for the botanical institutions of the continent, among them the glasshouses of the Muséum d'histoire naturelle in Paris, where the plant was kept under heat from one century into the next³.

This gardener's detail is the knot of the whole story.

The origin of Malagasy vanilla

Bory and co-authors, in American Journal of Botany in 2008, put forward the hypothesis now accepted: the cultivated Planifolia of the Indian Ocean and Indonesia derives from that single individual. A plant from an English glasshouse, multiplied by cuttings from one hand to the next, across 2 centuries and 2 oceans³. Tahitensis and Pompona followed other routes, which we will treat separately.

The idea circulated before genetics. Bouriquet, an agronomist of the field, already wrote in 1946 of « le clone de Paris » to name what had arrived in Madagascar. An observer's intuition, confirmed 60 years later by molecular markers¹.

This narrow starting base has a direct consequence for reading lots. It is the one that occupies us daily. The Planifolia material being almost the same from one plantation to the next, what distinguishes a vanilla plays out in the soil, the rainfall pattern, the shade of the support tree, the harvest date, the conduct of curing, the length of maturation. That is the ground we work on when we open to the world the terroirs of Madagascar that remain unknown.

Vanilla arrives on Bourbon Island, 1793 to 1875

Bourbon Island, today Réunion, serves as the relay between Europe and Madagascar. Favre and co-authors, in 2022, record 5 introduction events of V. planifolia cuttings on the island between 1793 and 1875⁴. The word used by the source deserves attention, these events are reported. The one in 1793 in particular remains poorly documented. The literature gives it as a mention rather than as an established planting².

Only one of these introductions took hold. Bouriquet gives the account: « En 1822, Marchant, ordonnateur à la Réunion, profita d'un voyage qu'il fit en France pour se procurer, dans les serres du Muséum de Paris, des boutures de Vanille du Mexique qu'on y cultivait en serre chaude depuis le siècle dernier. Ce fut cette troisième importation qui réussit seule et qui devint l'origine des plantations actuelles.¹ »

Another introduction deserves citing for itself. On 27 June 1819, Commander Philibert and the botanist Perrotet landed on Bourbon a plant of Vanilla pompona from Cayenne, described in the records as a big vanilla. Bouriquet, in 1954, gave it as vanished from the island. Genetics found it again. Bory and co-authors conclude in 2008 that it is apparently still present³. A plant held to be erased for more than half a century, returned to the inventory by the analysis of its own material. On the aromatic registers of these species, see Planifolia, Tahitensis, Pompona.

1819, two dates for one introduction

On this 1819 introduction the sources differ by a day. Bory writes 27 June 1819. The specification for the protected geographical indication Vanille de l'île de La Réunion, drawn up by the INAO, gives 26 June 1819¹⁰. A scientific source on one side, an institutional source on the other.

We flag the gap and leave it open. It is a fair picture of the historical material available on vanilla, made of colonial archives, agronomists' reports and successive retellings, where each rereading sometimes shifts a date by one notch.

From the first cuttings to the birth of a crop

Vanilla touches Madagascar long before it settles there. Éric T. Jennings, in a study published in 2025 drawing on the Malagasy national archives and the French overseas archives, places the very first arrival of vanilla at Sainte-Marie in 1822¹². The same year Marchant was bringing his cuttings from the Paris glasshouses to Bourbon.

The elders of the SAVA region we have met keep what follows. According to that oral tradition, those first cuttings at Sainte-Marie never gave pods¹³. We report it for what it is, a transmitted memory, alongside the dates the archive documents.

Jennings then documents several consignments of cuttings reaching Nosy Be, between the late 1840s and the 1870s¹². The plant moves from one island to another, from one trial garden to the next, without yet founding a crop.

What comes next changes the nature of the matter. Bouriquet writes in 1946: « Une cinquantaine d'années après, vers 1870, Madagascar recevait de l'île voisine, non seulement des boutures de l'Orchidée, boutures qui appartenaient selon toute vraisemblance, au clone de Paris, mais les premiers principes de culture de la plante et de préparation de ses fruits.¹ »

That sentence holds 2 transmissions. The plant first. The knowledge next. Madagascar receives at the same time the vine, the way to train it on its support, the hand pollination learned on Bourbon, the gestures of scalding, sweating and drying that turn a scentless green pod into a black aromatic one. Vanilla then arrives with its instructions.

It is this second transfer that makes the first ones fertile. A cutting alone stayed a botanical garden curiosity. Accompanied by the gesture, it becomes a crop, then an economy, then a landscape. Vanilla reaches the mainland of Madagascar in 1873¹².

What the DNA of Malagasy vanilla confirms

The work of Rasoamanalina and co-authors, published in 2024, covered 272 Malagasy accessions analysed across 17 948 SNP markers⁵. The result supports the descent from material that passed through Réunion.

The contribution of this study is to validate through data a chain long established on written tradition alone. What Bouriquet held to be likely in 1946, with nothing but the archive and a field eye, genomics now documents. The chronological markers this literature repeats come partly from secondary sources. We treat them with the same caution as the Réunion dates.

From the islands to the SAVA, settling in the north-east

Malagasy settlement begins with the islands before reaching the north-east coast. Sainte-Marie in 1822, Nosy Be in the decades that follow, the mainland in 1873, then the region that would become the SAVA, between Sambava, Antalaha, Vohemar and Andapa. Beyond those markers, the precise dates of the progression circulate from one work to another. We give them as an order of march rather than as a calendar.

What is established is that the SAVA offers the vine the conditions of its Mexican cradle. Steady heat, high humidity, a marked rainy season, forest cover to climb, draining slope soils. The plant finds its native ecology again 15 000 kilometres away. The region becomes within a few decades the world centre of the crop. How this territory reads today, terroir by terroir, is the subject of vanilla from Madagascar and the SAVA. The environment that hosts it is described in agroforestry and vanilla from Madagascar.

There remains the name under which this vanilla is sold, inherited from the island that passed it on. The Bourbon designation and what it covers are treated in Bourbon vanilla from Madagascar.

In the forest, another use

One thing stopped us in the field. Among certain groups living within the primary forest, we saw vanilla used in ritual practices, combined with cacao, coffee or tea, set to infuse to scent the air of a place. We report it as testimony to what we observed, at the scale of those communities.

The resonance is hard to ignore. Vanilla joined to cacao in a hot drink, held as the material of a moment that counts, is the founding Mesoamerican gesture, that of the Maya and the Mexica. It reappears 15 000 kilometres and a few generations away.

The underlying question stays open. Did vanilla graft itself onto rites that awaited it under another plant, or was it adopted quickly and deeply enough to become an element of the rite itself? It deserves separate work. We pose it here as it stands.

What this journey leaves in a pod

A pod from the SAVA carries this trajectory. An understorey in Veracruz, a cacao drink whipped to a foam, a market stall at Tlatelolco, a glasshouse in Paddington, an ordonnateur travelling to Paris, a gesture invented on Bourbon, a crossing westwards, a Malagasy region that recognises the plant as its own.

This history also frames our work. The Planifolia material being shared from one plantation to the next, the difference is made in the place and in the hand. That is why we select plot by plot and why we name each lot rather than dissolving it into an origin. An island that already carried 9 vanillas when Planifolia arrived has enough to occupy for a long time those who come looking for expressions.

For the vanilla we work with, browse our varieties and terroirs or discover our maturation.