**1. Introduction**

Since the publication of the first vanilla book by Bouriquet (1954c) and the more recent review on vanilla biodiversity (Bory et al., 2008b), there has been a world regain of interest for this genus, as witnessed by the recently published vanilla books (Cameron, 2011a; Havkin-Frenkel & Belanger, 2011; Odoux & Grisoni, 2010). A large amount of new data regarding the genus biodiversity and its evolution has also been obtained. These will be reviewed in the present paper and new data will also be presented.
