The world-renowned botanist on his sideline in crime fighting, getting a doctorate in his thirties and the potential of mushrooms to tackle climate change
WORDS PAULA MCWATERS PORTRAIT LISA LINDER
Dr Mark Spencer reckons that plants are woven into the fibre of his being. “I’ve been obsessed with them since I was a toddler growing up in rural Warwickshire,” he says. “I dream about them and I navigate my way around towns and cities by remembering something that’s growing on a street corner.” Certainly, his every waking hour is spent working with plant material, whether he is advising on invasive species, teaching a class on plant identification, looking after the unique herbarium samples at London’s renowned natural history institute, the Linnean Society, or studying flora to help piece together what has happened at a crime scene.
This latter endeavour – forensic botany – has become one of Mark’s specialities over the past 15 years, ever since he received a chance call from a detective when he was working as botany curator at the Natural History Museum in London. “I’d never been involved in forensics before, but a man’s body had been found in a ditch and the police asked me whether I could tell them how long it had lain there.” Plants, it seems, can provide vital evidence in serious crime scenes. The growth patterns of brambles, for example, are surprisingly ordered and can help establish a timeline. “By studying the number of stems and their rates of degradation, you can unpick the chronology. Establishing that a body has been there for, say, eight or nine years is so useful to the police in narrowing down records of missing people.”
Trace evidence can help unlock a mystery too, when fragments of plant material – a single leaf stuck to a shoe or a car tyre, for example, or pollen attached to clothing – can help pin a suspect to a crime scene. It is painstaking, meticulous work and Mark’s accrued knowledge of British plant life and years of rigorous scientific study make him ideally suited to it. Even so, it has taught him to look at plants in a different way. “You need to take in the whole scene, not derive a hypothesis from the first thing you see. The accuracy of my report is vital and I feel I am doing something really valuable that can help give hope and some closure after tragedy.” Now aged 55, he feels it is one of the things he is most proud of in his life.
Early on, it was always assumed that Mark would go into gardening, but two years into the Kew Diploma in Horticulture he
