I am also very lucky that I can escape and decompress, because I only do this part time. Being close to the people who do this full time and have done so for years is revealing. Some certainly bear the scars emotionally and a few are quite angry that our society does not really appreciate them. It is very gruelling work, physically and mentally. Some of my friends and family were particularly freaked out when I started doing this work, and most don’t want to hear about the cases I’m working on. In the early years, my partner was very concerned that I would be emotionally disturbed by the work. He also feared that I would be exposed to and potentially harmed by the perpetrators of these crimes. He had visions of me being targeted by associates of suspects. I must admit it is a possibility, but I suspect I’m more likely to die from eating a dodgy mushroom (I’m a keen forager).
Despite our collective creeping anxieties, most of us are not likely to come to harm. Europe has one of the lower homicide rates: approximately 3 people in every 100,000 are intentionally killed every year. In comparison, in Africa and the Americas the rate is 12.5 and 16.5. Within Europe, the homicide rate in the UK is on the lower side; in 2016 there were 571 homicides (about 0.9 per 100,000). Even though in recent years there has been an increase in violent crime in this country, the overall levels are low compared to the turn of the millennium. In 2001–2 there were 891 homicides here (about 1.5 per 100,000).
Not surprisingly, the causes of this decline and recent upturn are vigorously debated, both in academia and by the press and politicians. I am reciting these rough figures partially to emphasise that we really do live in a very safe society but also to introduce a rather odd aspect of my work. Most people tend to plan their annual holidays around school holidays and bank holidays or their inability to tolerate their boss’s behaviour for much longer. I tend to plan my holidays to avoid my peak season of work which is usually October to March. As far as I am aware, there is no significant increase in violent crime during those months. Burglaries are famously more frequent during the mid-winter festive season. But I have not been able to track down any evidence to suggest that homicides are more common after an omission of Brussels sprouts from the festive table. So, why am I busier at that time of year?
It appears that the absence of leaves on the trees may be to blame for my having to work outdoors in the wettest and coldest months of the year. Basically, people notice the deceased more easily when the branches are bare. We are visual animals and whilst our sense of smell is fairly good, it is deeply inferior to that of many other animals. One group of people who often report finding human remains are dog walkers as they are often alerted to the presence of the deceased by their pet. Owing to their superior sense of smell, dogs detect the dead far more easily than humans and they tend to investigate the source, especially if they are off the lead. When trees and shrubs are in full leaf and a dog bounds into the bushes, the owner is far less likely to be able to see what has aroused the excitement of their hound. As the leaves fall, our eyes take over from where our noses fail us, and the dead are revealed. I don’t have any evidence to prop up this assumption, but it makes sense and I have no other reasonable explanation for why I get called to more deposition scenes at that time of the year than any other.
I don’t remember how I fell in love with plants. In all probability, I didn’t – I was simply born this way. My mother tells me that as far back as she can remember I reacted to their presence. I was an early June baby, and in the summer of 1968 when I was still largely immobile, mum would put me and my pram in the garden under a presciently weeping ash tree. I would stay there for hours, contentedly staring at the branches and the sky. Perhaps this is why the impending loss of up to 95 per cent of our ash trees, due to the accidental introduction of an invasive fungus, fills me with a particular pain.
Once I began to crawl, mum said that I remained most biddable. All she needed to do was place me on my grandmother’s lawn in front of her flower bed full of lupins, delphiniums, irises and roses, and I would, again, sit and stare. Perhaps she should have been worried. I don’t remember the day, when I was about 3 years old, I caused our lovely neighbour Elsie great distress by finding a pair of scissors and a basket and proceeded to cut every one of her rose flowers off. To make things worse, I endeavoured to cut off the unopened buds, just below the head and with no stalk. I then laid the doomed blooms neatly in the basket, knocked on her door and awaited her pleasure. Mum tells me that Elsie demonstrated great fortitude, calmly received the basket, took me round to her now monochrome-green flowerbed and explained to me how to cut roses properly, and that it needed to be in the company of an adult. No doubt afterwards she went indoors and swore quite a bit to her husband Denis. She obviously forgave me, as one of my earlier childhood memories was picking the garden peas Denis had grown and shelling them with Elsie on her back doorstep. Most of them went in my mouth.
The first plant that I truly remember was a single hyacinth bulb lying on the steps outside my childhood home. Decades later, I can still point to the exact spot. I recall being enchanted by the pearlescent, papery reddish-purple tones of its skin. Instinctively, I picked it up and turned towards my mother’s rose bed, which was immediately opposite the location of my earlier rosaceous crime. I dug a shallow depression in the soil with my hands, placed the bulb into the depression, narrow end upwards, and covered the lower portion of the bulb with soil and firmed it down. I was enraptured. I stared at it and waited for something to happen. No one told me how to do this. Somehow, I just knew. The planting of the bulb was my own precious and private piece of joy. Over the next few weeks I quietly watched it start to grow, and the smooth, rich green of the emerging leaves captivated me. I became anxious and impatient when at last I saw the first signs of the flower buds being revealed from within their nest of green. One morning I ran out of the house to see if I was going to be treated to a full bloom, but I was met with a void. The bulb was gone, all that remained was a shallow depression. I was torn up with anguish and needed to discover what had happened. On interrogation, my mother confessed. She had weeded the flower bed and, not realising the bulb’s significance, she had dug it up and thrown it away. I was enraged, distressed and full of loss. Mum, in her guilt, sought to make amends by offering me a strip of ground under the front wall of the house. I accepted. I now had my first garden, in which I would grow lavender, radishes and marigolds.
I’m not simply trying to charm you with tales of my childhood. My longstanding passion for plants hopefully means that I have absorbed a lot of information that is, at times, useful. For many of us, we simply don’t associate plants and flowers, which bring most of us joy, with the darker side of humanity. We struggle to link the two, and I believe a major reason is that most of us simply don’t notice plants, despite their being ever-present in our lives. Usually they are the first aspect of the natural world that we see each morning as we open our curtains. Plant blindness, as it’s been labelled, is probably due to several factors. First, their movements are not like ours – they don’t leap, walk, fly or swim in a manner that is comparable to animals. They do move, and sometimes very fast, but we just don’t notice it.
We are animals with complex communication skills. Sadly, we tend to underestimate the communication and cognitive abilities of other organisms, especially plants. They can and very frequently do communicate. Our own biases have meant that it is only relatively recently that scientists have started seriously studying plant communication. Our own reliance on visual communication means that the less other organisms look like us, the less we connect with them. Thus, plants tend to be placed low in the psychological environment of most people. Our plant blindness may have deep evolutionary roots; prior to our ancestral societies developing agriculture and sedentary lifestyles, we had one eye out for the larger predators and another on the smaller ones we fancied for supper. Yes, plants were part of our lives, but we did not focus on them. A small hint of this can be seen in European, North African and Middle Eastern Palaeolithic a
nd early Neolithic art. The period is characterised by a diverse range of cave painting, pottery and carving depicting humanity and animals that are both artistic and unambiguous. As yet, I’ve found only one representation that is clearly botanical. This appears to be true of most societies, with the notable exception of the aboriginal cultures of Australia: their unique depiction of plant life stretches back at least 40,000 years.
My diversion into prehistory was aimed at illustrating that humanity is predisposed to plant-blindness. This has the consequence of obscuring their value and potential. We learn at school that plants generate oxygen and without that we’d die. We may also learn that humanity is dependent for its survival on about 20 types of crop. A child may also be obliged to identify the parts of a flower and then move on to something that is allegedly more interesting. For most of us, plants only remain in our lives as the recommended five a day in our diet and an etiolated yucca behind the television. Some of us are lucky and have been drawn into the world of plants by amateur gardening or natural history. Society risks so much by overlooking plants. Their value goes so much further than what we put on our plate. For example, numerous studies have shown that being able to see plants improves recovery times in hospitals, and access to the outdoors and exercising in it can be important in improving mental health. As science continues to explore the natural world we are learning far more about how plants – and other overlooked organisms like invertebrates, fungi and bacteria – enrich our lives, providing us with the tools to tackle the challenges we face.
Curiously, forensic science isn’t a science, it’s the application of scientific knowledge in the pursuit of understanding how a crime took place. As such, it is a synthesis of information and skills from a very wide range of sources. Potentially, almost everything that comes into contact with humanity could be used forensically. Two factors limit the use of forensics. First, our lack of knowledge. If we are unable to understand something (for example how it works or what it’s made of) then we are unable to define its potential relevance in a crime scene. People quite often question the need for primary or ‘blue skies’ research; to many it seems irrelevant – too abstract to be of use in the modern world. However, we often make major scientific (and economic) progress because of apparently esoteric research. Since the early 1980s, various scientists have studied and later developed techniques to produce nanostructured graphene (a form of carbon that exists in sheets of interconnected atoms). These research programmes are now starting to revolutionise many aspects of our lives such as medicine, electronics, energy storage and pollution management. When Gregor Mendel conducted his experiments on the inheritance of traits in peas (Lathyrus oleraceus) he was entirely unaware of the impact his work would have; it revitalised evolutionary theory and started the science of genetics and the study of DNA.
Much of the science that is used in forensics originated from a scientist thinking ‘how?’ or ‘what?’. To foreclose on blue-skies research is to shut down future achievements that may improve all aspects of human life, including forensics. Humans have been making synthetic plastics since 1907, when Leo Baekeland invented Bakelite. Since then we have modified plastics to our needs. Many have become important in the production of clothing or other materials that require a fibrous structure. Man-made fibres may also be useful in criminal investigation. But, without prior detailed and often unrelated research, our understanding of the diversity, structure, durability and persistence of man-made fibres would be limited. For forensics to thrive, it needs to be able to source knowledge gained from the non-forensic scientific world.
Which leads to my second factor. Without adequate financial resources to research novel scientific techniques, trial their applicability and prepare them for our criminal justice system, new and potentially powerful forensic tools will not be developed. Without support for scientific innovation and the development of forensic science we risk the hamstringing of our justice system. In the Netherlands, a nationally funded body, the Netherlands Forensic Institute, conducts research on a wide range of scientific disciplines such as ‘big data’ and cyber-forensics, medical forensics and novel approaches to crime-scene investigation. There is no equivalent institution in the United Kingdom although several universities have their own research programmes that are supported by government funds. Additionally, police forces need to have the staff, capacity and skills to use these innovative approaches to forensic science.
People often want to know ‘how easy is it to become a forensic botanist’? As far as I know, there is nowhere in the world that offers a qualification in forensic botany. To be viewed as a competent forensic botanist it would be necessary to have at least an undergraduate-level qualification in botany or plant sciences. Sadly, in the United Kingdom it is getting harder and harder to find universities that offer these courses. As well as having the basic qualifications there is a real need to have a lot of experience of field botany, which is traipsing around looking at plants in the wild.
My knowledge of plants is based upon a lifetime of observing them and the skills I learnt at university and at the Natural History Museum. This knowledge had to be reworked and applied anew when I became a forensic botanist. In general, I have never thought of myself as super clever and still don’t, I simply feel I am quite bright. The oft-quoted and rather controversial maxim that 10,000 hours of practice is needed to become an expert may have a grain of truth to it. To be able to flow through diverse information environments relating to your subject and the task at hand, it is undoubtedly necessary to put the hours in. I’ve been looking at and studying plants for about forty-five years; lurking in my brain there is a lot of information on our plant life.
In the joyous bubble of my pre-puberty childhood, I was largely unaware that other people were not also plant mad. I also had very loyal friends. On my seventh birthday my friend Christopher endured a trip to Oxford Botanic Garden as my guest. My childhood idyll didn’t last. My time at secondary school was awful and I went from being a happy child to a miserable one. I plunged from the top set ever downwards. By the time I left school, I had the second worst truancy record in the school; one of my close friends bested me. When we were about 13, we were told we needed to make plans for our future and that we’d get some assessment as to what sort of job suited us. Apparently, I was to become an insurance salesman. My school was unable to accommodate my curious interest in plants. I even volunteered to teach myself O level Latin and botany, but they were not interested. Little did they know (or care) that I’d been reading degree-level textbooks on botany since I was 10.
One year I went on a school geography field trip. I was over the moon, mainly because I really fancied the geography teacher – he had great legs and lovely hazel eyes. One day while we were walking in the uplands above Dovedale, I spotted a twayblade (Neottia ovata). The English name twayblade refers to its paired green leaves. It is a lovely demure orchid with small green flowers that look rather like little green aliens. The geography teacher asked me what I was looking at. I explained it was an exciting, lovely orchid and he dutifully responded with enthusiasm and asked me when it was going to flower. I told him it already was. He peered forward looking puzzled, then pitying and stood up and walked away. I blew that one! Thankfully, I had the joy of the diminutive Martian-emulating flowers of the twayblade to beguile me. They still do: the presence of their glossy paired leaves always signal to me that a botanical bounty awaits. Orchids are marvellous and complex plants. One of their peculiarities is that they have a very odd pollen. In most orchids it is aggregated into clumped structures known as pollinia and is quite unlike the dust-like pollen of other plants. Most orchids have very close ecological bonds with the insects that pollinate them. In many cases, without a suitable insect the orchid’s flowers will not be pollinated, and no seed will be produced. Because of this association and the pollinia, orchid pollen is very rarely found anywhere but on the plant or on the insect. It is unlikely to be found on a suspect or at a crime scene. Pollen
often appears as part of the story in many crime-scene dramas, and I’ll return to this topic later.
One of the main challenges in applying my botanical knowledge to forensics is adapting my observational skills. I now look at plants in a manner I previously would not have conceived of. Generally, we botanists are used to looking at the whole plant. Or, if it is a portion of a plant, such as a flowering branch of a tree or a seed, it is normally relatively pristine. This is freqeuntly not the case in the world of forensics, as evidence gathered at a crime scene is often very fragmentary and far from ideal for identification purposes. Commonly, the object I am examining is encrusted with mud and has been trodden into the sole of a shoe or onto a car wheel arch. Sometimes, the plant material is heavily degraded owing to protracted contact with decaying human tissue or has been exposed to the elements for long periods. I have had to draw upon the vast swathes of fully or partially recalled botanical experiences embedded within my memory to help me pull an identification to the surface of my mind.
My early childhood was spent exploring the plants and the countryside around my Warwickshire home and my grandparents’ house in Cornwall. These adventures helped foster an understanding of how landscapes in this country have evolved over time and have the form they do today. I remember collecting blackberries with my mother in some low-lying fields when I was a small boy and noticing the curious undulations in the land. I later came to learn that they were ridge and furrow, the remains of Saxon agriculture. Not only do they undulate appealingly but the gentle gradient creates niches in which a variety of wild plants can thrive. Sadly, most of the ones in our village were destroyed, first by ploughing for arable crops, and then by the arrival of the M40. The regular up and downward curves of these mounds create subtly varying growing conditions for plants. An experienced botanical eye will notice that at the bottom of the slope, where it is wetter, creeping buttercup (Ranunculus repens) grows; as the soil becomes somewhat dryer, meadow buttercup (R. acris) prevails; and, perched on and near the summit where the soil is driest, grows bulbous buttercup (R. bulbosus), the rounded bulbous rootstock providing it with stored water and nutrients for the hot summer months.
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