Sunday, Nov. 08, 2009

Boeing site draws botanist's eyes

Long before the Boeing Co.'s decision last week to build its second Dreamliner factory near the Charleston International Airport, before Vought Aircraft Industries Inc. and Global Aeronautica opened their fuselage plant nearby and even before that whole area fell under post-Sept. 11 security restrictions -- a College of Charleston botanist traipsed through the woods back there and photographed a flower.

As Jean Everett focused her Nikon D70 on the violet-petaled aster that fall day, she noticed in the background something unexpected.

"I looked up, and there's a southern sugar maple," she remembered. "The only place they grow is on salt mounds, but there is this maple. ... And I freaked."

In addition to the broad-leafed tree, Everett saw the tubular crimson flowers of Indian pink and the evergreen fronds of Christmas fern. Not exotic plants, they're just rare to the coast, where the ocean's energy prevented minerals from depositing in the ground and made the Lowcountry soil sandy and infertile compared with Piedmont clay or Upstate rock.

"But," as Everett likes to say, "the plants don't lie."

Now as Boeing prepares to break ground on its assembly line before month's end, she contacted The Post and Courier, hoping to connect with someone at the company.

"I want to document what's out there so that an herbarium record exists,"

Everett said, sitting in her office on the second floor of the Science Center on Coming Street, where an orchid poster hangs on one wall, the shed exoskeletons of horseshoe crabs on another. "What I really want to do is rescue them."

But just to be clear about one point: Everett does not want to halt or even delay Boeing's plans.

When Boeing officials heard her story and contacted her Thursday, Everett told them just that. In return, the company's project manager will consider her case.

A self-taught geology enthusiast, Everett knows why those misplaced species grow there; it's the same reason one of North Charleston's main thoroughfares is called Ashley Phosphate Road. Seawater rich in the mineral washed over and settled atop calcium carbonates in the Cooper River marl to create the Hawthorne Phosphatic Sand and Clay Formation.

The result: Charleston's mineral deposits made it a phosphate mine boomtown during the turn of the century, and plants that should grow elsewhere thrive near what became, thanks to last week's announcement, the area's most high-profile piece of land.