Operation plant-rescue

Long before the Boeing Co.'s decision last week to build its second Dreamliner factory near the Charleston International Airport, before Vought Aircraft Industries and Global Aeronautica opened their fuselage plants 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 plant 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 in 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 20th 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.

For the better part of a decade, Everett tried to get back to the site, making her requests with Vought and finding, for each meeting planned, a cancellation.

Once, after picking up her sister from the airport, she pulled off the road to check out an interesting plant and, absorbed in the process, didn't notice the policeman standing over her until he cleared his throat.

Looking through computer files of other plants she suspects are growing on the property, she said, "I hate to see those sites just mowed down. They could make use of this instead of mowing everything down and planting, I don't know, Bradford pears."

If allowed on the property, Everett suspects she could rally plenty of like-minded friends.

"I could mobilize the Native Plant Society, probably dozens of people," she said. "Normally most of us are opposed to digging up plants, because it's stealing."

But in this case, with Boeing's groundbreaking near, the terrain where the plants now grow soon will look little like the place where Everett paused to photograph a purple flower some 10 years ago.

Reach Allyson Bird at 937-5594 or abird@postandcourier.com.