By the 1950s, Jones and his wife were still living in Lincolnshire with no electricity or running water. He was a Victorian outcast who could not reconcile himself to the realities of living in the modern age. His children were shocked to find that for many years he did not claim his rightful old age pension. Always a proud man, he considered it charity. He died at age 92 on November 15, 1959. These would be the salient events of a seemingly solid, unassuming, yet useful life except for a discovery made twenty-two years later.
Robert Flynn Johnson
Introduction to Plant Kingdoms: The Photographs of Charles Jones