Though not a staple food source this temperate growing vine does provide the Galen more than one use, firstly its fruits can be fermented to produce a wine of sorts, secondly flower clusters can be taken and pressed for their essential oil, which has medical properties, mainly as an antiseptic, and anti-inflammatory, and lastly the leaves can be taken to produce a salad crop.

            The vine itself is a perennial plant, though nothing above ground survives the winter (and is often cut down before the new year), ever year new shoots sprout from the plants crown, these shoots produce that years flowers, fruit and leaves. Subsurface these shoots are fueled from thick roots that have stored nutrients from the previous year, these roots can be lifted and divided to produce new plants, and indeed for most agriculture this is the only method of propagation as the plants have been cultivated to produce seedless fruits.

            The new shoots are trained on wires, which are generally nowadays arranged in a sort of cone shape radiating upwards and outwards from the crown, the shoots will naturally wrap around these wires, though each shoot is made sure to coil around a separate wire to encourage proper spacing and better growth. When the number of shoots is greater than the original scaffold these additional shoots are wrapped around new poles sunk into the ground near the plant. Generally a plant will not generate more than a dozen shoots during the sprouting time in the early spring of that year.

            The stems that grow from the shoots sprout large wide leaves paired in intervals of about 15cm, and from each junction a flower cluster will appear. The shoots can grow to a final length of about 3m, though the last 50cm or so of that stem will not bear flowers or fruit (formation blocked from auxins formed at shoot tip), most commonly the new stem will not fork, though occasionally a leaf junction will produce a new shoot which will attach and grow along the nearest wire.

            At the end of spring the leaf junctions sprout a flower cluster with six to eight flowers spouting on individual stems from each pair of leaf junctions. The flowers can be any number of colours, most cultivated varieties have either a pale pink or yellow/green flower. Galen flowers do not differ markedly in structures to Earth’s flowers, they have an outer coloured petal set, an inner petal set whose colour is muted but which generates a strong odour (these vines generate a pine like smell in flower), and a central mast (which houses the complicated sets of germ cells) which is covered in fine hair. These flowers are seldom more than 3cm across and a very transient, each flower lasting only a few days. For some vines all the flowers are picked for pressing, and later in the season the plants will re-sprout the flowers so that some leaf junctions can provide four or even five crops of flowers every year. For most vines, fruit is desired as well as flower, and some thinning to the flower clusters (say removing a third) provides flower, and also reduces the drop of the forming fruit.

            The fruit develop from the flowers central mast, which if pollinated develops into a fruit, and if is not pollinated ruptures to release its own pollen, growers will tend to grow a few ‘early vines’ which flower before the rest and pollinates them, these plants tend only to be used for their flowers (as they seldom generate any large amount of fruit). The fruit grows to form a gherkin like shape perhaps 4cm long and 1cm wide, these fruits become translucent and scarlet on ripening. The fruit is made of a series of compartments spirally arranged around an internal stem, each compartment shares the walls with the neighboring compartments, and can not be separated as individual units. In fruitless varieties the compartments are only filled with translucent red flesh, in seeded varieties a seed would be suspended centrally in each compartment.

            The fruits are generally ripe and ready to pick shortly after midsummer, they are generally still picked by hand, and are easily detached from each leaf junction, these fruits are then either pressed or mashed, and nearly always fermented.

            This particular crop is grown in the temperate latitudes, but does require a hot and sunny summer to push for proper fruit ripening, each particular vine plant has no real lifetime, but are generally replaced by newer stock every fifteen to thirty years, often allowing one or to years for the soil to rest, and other crops to be planted in their place.