«A tree never lies» is the assumption of David J.Gibson, science communicator and professor of plant biology at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, at the basis of his Botanical Clue surprising treatise on forensic botany translated for Il Saggiatore by Allegra Panini.
The book tells of how plants can solve crimes, how they play the role of investigators but also of silent witnesses, yet very talkative if duly consulted.
The point, explains Gibson, is that plants are not addressed: they are not considered pillars of our ecosystem, nor are they a wealth of clues to help us understand human cures. The author reports a concept formulated by James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler, that of plant blindness, which often causes the loss of key evidence that could determine the fate of civil and criminal trials.
THE FIRST PART OF THE BOOK is the reconnaissance of a long series of crimes cold case in the resolution of which the plant world played a decisive role; with the coldness of an anatomopathologist Gibson recalls brutal chronicles of kidnappings, violence, murders to some extent, if possible, softened by the incursion into the world of plants.
The biologist talks about complexes of plant species that have offered useful information for locating and dating clandestine burials, and reviews the possible evidential elements linked to the vegetation growing in the tombs; it even considers the gastric analysis of the residues of some last (vegetable) dinners: an examination which in certain cases has led to the reconstruction of entire salad menus served in specific fast food restaurants, thus establishing a link between places, suspicious people and victims.
THERE HAVE BEEN CASES in which plants were fundamental in distinguishing cases of murder from accidents or suicides, thanks, for example, to the discovery of broken branches in the hair attributable to certain railing plants beyond which the victim took his own life.
Wood in particular is endowed with a strange eloquence, capable, for one thing, of tracing the perpetrator of a crime from the fragments of a ladder used for the crime; not to mention the algae whose persistence dynamics on clothes are known to science and make them coveted finds in the forensic field.
Mushrooms are also very important: sometimes murder weapons can also be used to estimate the time that has passed since the moment of death, to calculate the moment in which a corpse was abandoned or hidden, to identify bodies.
LESS MACABRE but the chapters dedicated to the mapping of plant DNA and the one on forensic pharmacopoeia are very instructive: plant poisons, from Socrates’ hemlock to belladonna, so called because it was used in the Renaissance in cosmetics by virtue of its ability to dilate the pupils and make the eyes bigger ; the effect that is achieved today with the filter on the iPhone was made possible by the presence of atropine in the plant, an alkaloid with potentially lethal effects.
THE PLANT WORLD provides material for criminologists and criminal lawyers even when, not infrequently, plants become objects of contraband, a fate that especially befalls orchids, carnivorous plants, rosewood oil, wood from endangered tropical trees, and also this it is discussed extensively in the book.
Above all, however, the media and judicial spotlight is intertwined with the vegetal world when the flowers of evil are poppies from which assorted opiates are obtained: cocaine, doda (known as “poor people’s heroin” obtained by mincing the peels and seeds of the capsules and increasingly in vogue), heroin, morphine and codeine.
Nature is lavish with other drugs such as, among others, cannabis, kava and kratom, the latter two often confused. Kratom, an evergreen tropical tree, also used legally to relieve ailments related to chronic pain, often travels fraudulently in packages labeled as “incense” or “paint pigment”.
The book: Botanical Cluedo by David J.Gibson, Il Saggiatore, 17.60 euros
