The story of vanilla is anything but plain.
Thanks to Edmond Albius, an unsung Black botanical genius on the French island of Réunion in the 19th century, vanilla literally flowered. And thanks to Gaëlle Bélem, the Réunionese novelist long-listed for the 2025 International Booker Prize, Albius’ remarkable story has found its champion.
“The Rarest Fruit,” first published in French in 2023, has received a sprightly English translation by Hildegarde Serle. The book is that rare find: a revealing, history-infused novel that spills its tale with the eager breathlessness, wry commentary, and frank truths of a close friend.
Why We Wrote This
In historical fiction, novelists often bring us stories of people forgotten by history. By illuminating their lives, the authors help complete the record of human discovery and achievement.
Born in 1829 on Bourbon Island, as Réunion was then called, Edmond never meets his enslaved Black parents: a mother who died after childbirth and a father who disappeared. The weeks-old infant, at the whim of his mother’s enslaver, instead becomes a gift: “From Elvire, your beloved sister. A birth for a rebirth,” reads the note on his tiny wrist. The recipient, a despondent white horticulturist and widower named Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont, is immediately smitten; he launches into raising the child, pushing him around the property in a wheelbarrow.
“Edmond knows he’s not a slave like the others,” writes Bélem. He sleeps in a real bed, plays in the fields, “and seizes happiness with both hands.” It’s an uncomfortable straddle. “Somewhere in his child’s brain, he’s sorry … for being a double misfit, an imposter in short trousers, but he tells himself that it isn’t his fault. It’s that of the precise mechanics of chance that made him grow up between two races, surrounded by the rarest of flowers.”
And surrounded he is. In “a vast nursery behind a wooden door,” Edmond toddles after Ferréol as he tends a boisterous Eden of amaryllises, quill plants, cattleyas, and physalises. The child quickly demonstrates a gift for memorizing not only the names of the plants in their care, but also their quirks and needs. At age 5, he is keeping his own kitchen garden; by 7, he has proclaimed his intention to be a botanist.
Ferréol is not amused. “Seven future botanists in the neighborhood, that’s far too many,” he puffs. “Six is quite enough. You’ll be a gardener.” Such blatant refusals and limited expectations, the dismal legacy of slavery, dog Edmond throughout his life.
Yet he persists. Radiating his trademark ebullience, the lad continues to shadow his mentor, now with notebook and pencil in hand. (He can write only his name, but that doesn’t stop him from sketching and scribbling while cataloging the nursery’s abundance.) “To make up for all shameful ignorance, he retains fast, retains by heart, all that he hears, breathes, sees,” the author writes. When an amateur naturalist visits, it’s Edmond who gives him a tour, moving “from flower to flower with the lightness of a butterfly.” The visitor is impressed; Edmond, rattling off the names of 49 orchids, 51 other flowers, and 27 tree species during the three-hour stint, glows.
The discovery that will shape – and then haunt – Edmond’s days comes in 1841. Applying everything he has absorbed over his 12 short years, the budding naturalist begins to fiddle with Ferréol’s vanilla plant, an orchid with an ephemeral flower and a stubborn resistance to being pollinated outside its native Mexico. There’s trial and error and trial again. Months pass. It’s not until Edmond discovers, between the male and female flower bits, an “obstacle, like a little door,” which he can lift with the tip of a stick, that the pollination mystery cracks open.
Five weeks later, Edmond enters the nursery to find a freshly sprouted vanilla pod. “So this is the rarest fruit in the world!” he cheers. But his jubilation soon wilts. Ferréol – one part incredulous, three parts jealous – refuses to accept that a Black enslaved preteen engineered the vanilla breakthrough.
A torrent of change follows: to Edmond’s fame and prospects, to Bourbon’s agricultural economy, to Ferréol’s health and conscience. There are ups, yes, but even more downs as Edmond struggles to do what he loves: tend the earth, compare notes, delight in growth.
When it arrives in the chilly days of August 1880, the ending – of both Edmond and the book – feels too abrupt. Yet “The Rarest Fruit” shines.
Bélem deftly wields the flashlight of truth, and a very witty pen, to transform little-known history into an exquisite ode.
