Plantation's land returns to nature

Now Robert Clement III is working to reverse that and return the property to the way nature created it. It has taken a decade and sweat equity, and in the end, it is something he knows he will never be able to complete.

"We can't take it back exactly the way it was. We won't accomplish that," Clement said as he jockeyed an electric cart along the trails rambling through the 1,000-acre family plantation just up from the U.S. Highway 301 bridge crossing into Georgia.

But the Charleston real estate developer is among a growing number of landowners working to restore wetlands around South Carolina.

More than a third of the land at Willingham is set aside under a 30-year easement under the Wetland Reserve Program of the U.S. Agriculture Department's Natural Resources Conservation Service.

The land cannot be developed, and in return, the government provides a modest cash incentive, as well as technical and financial assistance to restore wetlands, which filter groundwater, help reduce flooding and provide wildlife habitat.

"The more habitat you have here, the more wildlife you can have surrounding it," said Walter Earley, a district conservationist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Since 1996, about 25,000 acres of restorable wetlands have been enrolled in the program statewide. Last year alone, $10 million in assistance was provided to landowners in the state.

"It's a good investment for the government of the United States," Earley said.

Clement and his father, a prominent Charleston attorney, assembled the tract from two former farming plantations.

They started by restoring the 4,500-square-foot plantation house once used as a hunting lodge. It had fallen so badly into disrepair that the interior required pressure washing.

As difficult as that was, restoring wetlands is even more of a challenge.

The family has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to replant trees, remove old culverts that drained the land and install irrigation systems and pumps.

When he started, "I was unconsciously incompetent," Clement said with a laugh. "It's moved to the point where I'm consciously incompetent."

The idea, when they bought the land, was to have a hunting plantation.

"We thought this is a place in the county where you go and buy it and you go out and plant a few fields and wildlife will show up and then you go hunting," he said.

But much of the wildlife had disappeared because of alterations through the years. Clement took classes on everything from tree farming to wildlife, learning just how difficult it can be to restore an ecosystem.

Uplands had been planted with fast-growing loblolly pines, which are great for turning timber profits, but not so great for wildlife habitat. Longleaf pines are the indigenous trees in the area.

"It handles fire, and it's good for wildlife," Clement said. "When you burn the weeds, the grasses that grow up are wildlife food, plus its cone is edible."

With loblolly forests, "the deer had better be packing his lunch box because he's going through a biological desert," he added. In some places, the loblolly was clear cut and replaced with plantings of long leaf pine.

In other areas, drainage pipes were removed and berms restored to bring the water table back to normal.

"You have to be willing to fail," Clement said. "The first time I tried planting some hardwood bottoms, it didn't work so well. The first couple of times we planted the long leaf, it didn't work so well."

At the far end of the property, a gentle breeze wafts through trees reflected darkly in the standing water of a reclaimed wetland. It looks like other bottomland swamps in the Lowcountry.

Another sign of success is that alligators have returned to the property. Clement wants his children to know the wild South Carolina he knew as a boy hunting and fishing on Kiawah Island when there were only a handful of homes on the resort island.

But another reason for reclaiming the wetlands is linked to his everyday job. A number of his company's Charleston projects, about 30 in all, have involved building anew after cleaning contaminated urban sites.

Reclaiming such sites for future development may help preserve places such as Willingham, where nature is being reclaimed, Clement said.

"If we can ... reuse everything that has been used, it stops the sprawl so you don't have to use greenfields," he said. "It ties in for me. It makes sense for me."