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Chapter 4. Vanilla in Herbaria
Marc Pignal
Abundant in tropical regions of the globe, the genus Vanilla has challenged morphologists. Although the molecular approach provides a glimpse of the phylogenetic structure of the group, the clear definition of species is fraught with difficulties. This chapter opens the “Vanilla File” and lists some technical aspects that hinder the study of the only orchid cultivated for food.
Lack of Taxonomic Revision
Although cultivated vanilla has been the subject of many studies, the wild species, and more particularly those that have no agronomic qualities (being odorless or too capricious for cultivation) have not been studied in a synthetic way. Admittedly, studies on many taxa were published, as seen among members of the Orchidaceae family. The Kew Index lists more than 250 species (Anonymous, 2009), but the taxonomic revisions are missing.
The first complete taxonomic treatment of the genus Vanilla was carried out by Rolfe in 1896. It recognizes 50 species. The last revision by Portères (1954) in Bourriquet’s book, La vanille et le vanillier dans le monde, includes 110 species. Portères’ work, although rich in biogeographic data, is unfortunately not exhaustive because several taxa published by the Brazilian botanist Hoehne between 1941 and 1944 (Hoehne, 1941, 1944) are not mentioned. These works date back to the years of the Second World War, and European libraries in the 1950s had difficulty in supplementing their collections.
The lack of adequate treatment is directly related to the state of herbarium specimens in collections, which are the basis of any taxonomic and nomenclatural reasoning.
Collections Still Poor
Collections by past botanists are scarce and illustrations have often been used in place of specimens. This is the case for the “historical herbaria” of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. In Lamarck’s herbarium, for example, only one figure illustrates vanilla, taken from the Encyclopédie Méthodique. The legend is in French: Petite vanille ou vanille musquée (small vanilla or vanilla musk). The drawing is sufficiently precise to identify Vanilla palmarum. The Jussieu herbarium is hardly any richer, with only one specimen of Vanilla aromatica. Are these illustrations derived from herbarium specimens? This is doubtful. Drawing from live specimen or from another illustration is common. This significantly contributed to confusion about the genus upon its official publication in the botanical nomenclature (Miller, 1768), even though vanilla was already widely cultivated.
Miller (1768) at first distinguishes “two or three varieties which differ in the color of their flowers and the length of their pods.” Then he recognized them as two species: V. mexicana and V. axillaris. It seems today that the specimens described by Miller included at least our existing species V. planifolia and V. pompona.
Modern collections suffer from the same flaws as their predecessors: rare collections that are often fruitless and flowerless. When flowers are present, they are poorly dried or unprepared, making determinations uncertain. Moreover, species are often represented by a single specimen.
Some major herbaria in the world possess vanilla specimens. In North America, the New York Botanical Garden is very active in New World tropical research. In Brazil, the Hoehne collection is conserved in the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Gardens. But many other structures also conserve vanilla.
This is the reason for many databases and Web sites to allow the remote consultation of specimens. Particular mention should be made of the GBIF, Global Biodiversity Information Facility (http://data.gbif.org), which brings together several hundred natural history collections and offers a gateway for the consultation of specimen data. Since 2003, the Web site of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris has been providing data and photographs of all the Orchidaceae included in its collections (http://www.mnhn.fr/base:sonnerat.html). The Aluka Foundation proposes a partially paying service for consulting all types from Africa and America (http://www.aluka.org). The Swiss Orchid Foundation at the Jany Renz Herbarium, Basel (http://orchid.unibas.ch/site.sof.php), offers a very comprehensive Web site.