Genus Neumannia

For Joseph Henri François Neumann (1800–1858), French head gardener of the greenhouses of the Imperial Museum of Natural History, Paris. According to Popular Science Monthly (Volume 15, Sept. 1879): ‘Neumann, head gardener at the Paris Museum of Natural History, was the first to obtain … in 1838 … (from) a single stock … over two hundred vanilla fruits of excellent quality.’ In the wild, Vanilla planifolia, a species of vanilla orchid native to Mexico, has less than a 1 per cent chance of being pollinated. Neumann discovered a simple method to transfer the pollen from the anther to the stigma. He wrote The Art of Building and Governing the Serres (= Greenhouses) (1846).