A small lily like, greenish - yellow vanilla flowers with stout inflorescences with up to twenty to 30 flowers, but more usually six to fifteen open from the base upwards. Only one or three flowers open at one time and each lasting few hours. The flower opens in the morning and closes some hours later, never to re-open. The vanilla flower is inacapable of self-pollination without the aid of an outsider. If it is not manually pollinated it will shed the day after. Hence, one pollinated flower will bear a bean.

Commercial crop production entirely depends on hand-pollination, mostly which result the hefty price at this early stage in production. The seed pod develops over a period of eight to nine months and about 200 mm in length to become a pendulous, narrowly-cylindrical bean.