Planting Clues

Discover the extraordinary role of plants in modern forensics, from their use as evidence in the trials of high profile murderers such as Ted Bundy to high value botanical trafficking and poaching. We are all familliar with the role of blood spatters or fingerprints in solving crimes, from stories in the media of DNA testing or other biological evidence being used as the clinching evidence to incriminate a killer.

David J. Gibson – 90.5 WICN Public Radio

‘48 Hours’ reveals how Missouri Botanical Garden scientists helped convict a killer

The CBS show will detail how local scientists worked with juniper needles to help tie the suspect to the crime.

Plants and murder - forensic botany in crime fiction

This short novella about fictional botanical forensics accompanies my full-length true crime book Planting Clues: How Plants Solve Crimes (Oxford University Press) available from booksellers everywhere. Check and let me know in your review how useful it is to help you sleuth the realism of fictional forensic botany reviewed here in Juice of Cursed Hebenon Everyone likes a good murder mystery. Indeed, it is said that it’s a British obsession. I should know, as a Brit, I love a good true novel. Novelists and film script writers are happy to oblige and in many cases include a good dose of forensic botany into the fictional mix. A representative selection of widely known crime fiction novels, especially classic works, is presented in this chapter, to draw out common misrepresentations and highlight how fiction can present general principles of forensic botany. Shakespeare, Agatha Christie (Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot), and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) are all well-known authors of classic literature who often included forensic botany in their work. Contemporary authors, including Ellis Peters (the Cadfael Chronicles), Rebecca Rothenberg (the Claire Sharples’ mysteries), Joyce and Jim Lavene (the Peggy Lee Garden Mysteries), and even bona-fide forensic botanist Jane Bock (her Arizona Borderland mysteries) tease readers of their novels with plant-based evidence. Movies and television crime series sometimes include forensic botany. Plant fragments, plant DNA evidence, plant toxins, and fungal evidence can be critical for solving these fictional crimes. But, how realistic are these portrayals? In reviewing forensic botany in fiction, I invite you the reader to act as a detective sleuthing the realism of the evidence, how it is collected, and how it is used.

Death of two-year-old from mould in flat a ‘defining moment’, says coroner

Awaab Ishak died in 2020, eight days after his second birthday, following ‘chronic exposure’ in Rochdale