In Bloom

Ben Sill is a professor emeritus of civil engineering who was known for his engaging and sometimes offbeat teaching style. He led the expansion of Clemson University’s general engineering program and its move to Holtzendorff Hall in the early 2000s, and he was the founding chair of the Department of Engineering and Science Education.

But it would be a mistake to reduce Ben to his curriculum vitae. He fought to save the Clemson Experimental Forest from development, and he’s cataloged its flora, fauna and cultural artifacts. He played a key role in putting together a guidebook for the Foothills Trail.

And since the 1970s, he’s been hybridizing bromeliads — four of which have Clemson names as living tributes to the University where he’s planted deep roots.

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The greenhouse next to Ben Sill’s home teems with life as the garden hose in his hands sprays a mist onto some of the more than 1,000 bromeliads in his collection. The paddle-shaped leaves burst from their pots, reaching up to the light streaming through the glass ceiling. Tiger-like black stripes cut across the green of some leaves, while others are purple and freckled with white. Bright pink flowers erupt from some of the plants like fireworks streaming into the sky. Water pools in the center of others.

Ben sets down the hose. Like a proud father, he begins to recall his adventures in creating and naming bromeliad cultivars. He has selected Clemson-inspired names for four, and many others are named for family and friends. In all, Bromeliad Society International credits Ben with registering 92 cultivars dating to 1977.

Ben inspects the plants as he makes his way through the greenhouse. When he sees a brown spot on one leaf, he gently tears it off. 

“Bromeliads bloom once and then they die, and that can put people off,” Ben says. “But they always put out ‘babies.’”

He points to one of the babies, or pups, poking from the side of a purple variety.

The next generation has sprouted. 

Living Tributes 

Ben, whose grandfather owned a large plant nursery in Atlanta, says he first became interested in plants when he was a graduate student at North Carolina State University. He was courting his wife, Lois Sill, when she gave him a Haworthia they named Penelope. They still have descendants from the original in their greenhouses.

Ben has been creating hybrids of bromeliads since the 1970s, and he and Lois added a second greenhouse at their home after he retired. 

In the wild, bromeliads thrive in tropical climates, growing from the ground and on trees and rocks. Ben points out that Spanish moss, one of the defining features of the Lowcountry, is a bromeliad.

To hybridize bromeliads, Ben takes pollen from the flower of one plant and gently rubs it onto the sticky stigma of another plant’s flower. If it works, the second plant will produce seeds that combine traits from both parents.

Patience is key. It takes about three or four years of tending to a plant before Ben knows whether its beauty makes it a keeper. When he has one, he registers it with the Bromeliad Society International.

“Some of them are ugly,” he admits. “So, the ones that are ugly, you sort of throw them down the well, and the pretty ones you can name.”

Ben named two types of bromeliads — a Billbergia and a Neoregelia — Clemson Tiger. One is tiger-striped, and one is orange. Another Billbergia is named Class of ’39, a nod to the class that went through World War II and left its mark on the world in many ways. Still another Billbergia is named after Jim Sweeny ’39, HD ’10, who Ben sees as epitomizing the class’s spirit.

 Hurling Tennis Balls in Class 

Ben, who turned 80 in May, has been nurturing plant, human and animal life for decades. His work can be seen in full bloom not only on campus but throughout the Clemson area.

Ben worked at Duke Power before joining Clemson’s civil engineering faculty in 1976 to study the wind effects of hurricanes. As a professor, he garnered a reputation for capturing students’ attention.

For a lesson on momentum transfer, he had all the students in his class simultaneously hurl tennis balls at a plywood target on stage and then went through the equation to explain why it fell over. He taught buoyancy by having students calculate how much of a dead, upside-down cow would stick out of the water.

In 1999, Ben says, then-Dean Tom Keinath tapped him to lead the general engineering program. It gives first-year engineering students a chance to knock out fundamental courses and explore engineering disciplines before choosing their majors.

Ben remembers that when he started, the program consisted of him, two advisors, one other faculty member and an administrative assistant located in four Riggs Hall offices. With enrollment climbing, it soon became apparent the program would need more space. 

But there was pushback, Ben says, from faculty members who felt strongly that students ought to select a major when they first arrived on campus and that general engineering was unnecessary. Ben recalls arguing that too many students transferred out of their majors after their first year and that they needed time to decide.

The argument in favor of general engineering prevailed, and Ben led the program’s move to Holtzendorff Hall circa 2001, giving the program about 10,000 square feet to spread out. Four years later, in 2005, fellow faculty selected him for the Class of ’39 Award. 

General engineering is still the gateway to engineering for more than 1,400 students every year. This year, it marked a major milestone — and solidified Ben’s legacy — when the College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences faculty voted to reclassify it from program to department.

“It cements that what we’re doing is important to the college and that our faculty are playing a crucial role in creating future engineers,” says Joe Watkins, the department’s chair.

Representing the Frogs 

Ben’s Clemson legacy extends far — even further than his bromeliads and engineering pedagogy.

In the early 2000s, Ben became one of the more vocal advocates for the Clemson Experimental Forest, which now spans 19,200 acres. He remembers hearing that a report on the proposed development of the forest had been commissioned and that developers and real estate agents were being interviewed.

Around then, Ben began working with his good friend John Garton, herpetologist and former senior biologist for Duke Energy, to inventory the forest’s flora and fauna, including green tree, squirrel tree and breeding wood frogs.

When he heard about the proposed development, he asked a simple question: “Who’s representing the frogs?”

In the forest, Ben found simple forms of beauty. He recalls witnessing the sun rise over Lake Issaqueena while a family of four otters playfully swam as one of his favorite memories. For several years, he passed his appreciation of the forest to his students, teaching an honors course on and in the forest. He took students there for three hours a week, teaching them about the birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, plants and trees, introducing students to the world around them.

So, when no one stepped up to represent the frogs, Ben took on that role, not only for the frogs but for all the forest’s inhabitants. The forest was never developed, and Ben now feels the University has adequately committed to its long-term protection.

“You cannot replace the Clemson Forest, and I’ve got a map that shows it,” Ben says. “If you look at the housing developments in Clemson, Central and Seneca, Clemson Forest is very much like Central Park in New York. It’s totally surrounded, and it is the area’s green space. It’s the largest public university forest adjacent to its university in the country.”

Efficiency and Curiosity 

The colors and patterns of the plants decorating Ben’s greenhouse are almost as diverse as the varied interests of Ben himself. 

He is a birdwatcher and has co-authored four satirical birding books with his brother and sister-in-law. He has written 129 pages of poetry. He has put together a compendium of magic tricks learned from the internet and has published articles on fish, frogs, snakes and volleyball.

Heyward Douglass ’69, M ’71, who has been Ben’s friend for more than 30 years, says that each December, Ben leads a group for the Audubon Christmas bird count. The group ventures into the woods around Clemson to help determine the health of the local flying fauna.

When Douglass, a longtime leader of the Foothills Trail Conservancy, saw that the trail’s guidebook needed an update in the 1990s, he turned to Ben for his expertise in improving documents. Maps covered the Sill family’s dining room table for months.

With 80 years behind him, Ben is still going strong. He gives presentations to civic groups and retirement communities on more than 60 topics ranging from flying machines to funny animals. He is an elder and Sunday school teacher at Fort Hill Presbyterian Church.

And don’t forget this: This octogenarian is on call to remove copperheads and other snakes from his neighbors’ yards.

How does he do it all? Efficiency and curiosity, he says.

“It’s like a disease, and I don’t recommend that people have it,” he says. “But it is fun.”

Behind the Humor 

Lois says that her husband of 56 years is an amazing father of two and grandfather of five who supports his children’s and grandchildren’s endeavors. She says he is a jokester who can come across as superficial at first, but there is much more to him.

“How many books about theology have you read?” she asks her husband in their Central, South Carolina, home one afternoon.

“In the past 15 years?” he asks. “Over 80.”

“There’s a depth there that I think the humor and the silliness can hide,” says Lois, a retired Clemson librarian. “There’s more than meets the eye.”

“He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body,” says Douglass, who served as Clemson’s pilot until his retirement. “When he meets an opposing viewpoint, he doesn’t hesitate to present a strong alternative. But as far as just being a decent person and looking at the good side of things, that would be Ben Sill for sure.”

Ben says that spirituality has become more important to him in recent years. He has developed a course aimed at helping Christians talk to each other about sensitive topics, such as politics, and plans to teach it at Fort Hill Presbyterian in the fall.

If it goes like he hopes, it will be one more pup in the Clemson soil that will grow and bloom like a bromeliad flower years after he is gone.

“I would hope that people think that whatever I did, I did the right way and didn’t try to cut corners or cheat or fool anybody,” Ben says. “The career I had was at Clemson University, and that 30-year period was identifiable. But these other things, most people don’t know I do.”

Whether they are aware of it or not, Ben’s influence endures — on campus and beyond.

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Paul Alongi is a writer in the College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences.. 

Photography by Ashley Jones.

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Beyond the greenhouse, Ben has always found ways to inspire and engage others through his hobbies, including poetry. Each year, he read “The Engineer,” a poem he wrote, to first-year Clemson engineering students, reminding them that engineers not only solve problems but also shape the world we live in.

The Engineer by Ben Sill

Got a problem?
Need it solved?
Just call an engineer!

They’ve got the recipe you see
I think it’s very clear.
They all know math and chemistry
And physics it is true.
And with these tools create a world,
A new world just for you.

From great Egyptian pyramids
And aqueducts in Rome
To trading ships with billowed sails;
To knives and forks and combs.

From harvesters that feed us all
And weapons that protect,
To tools and clocks and violins
Inventions to perfect.

Yes, through the years, why engineers
Made chariots and plows
And catapults and rockets
And machines for milking cows.

The telegraph and radio and stoves and thoroughfares
And microwaves and oil wells and doors and locks and chairs.
Should we mention satellites and pencils, bricks, and brooms
Along with printed circuits and Ferris wheels and looms.

New cars and irrigation,
Bar codes and telescopes;
Computer interfaces,
And batteries and ropes.

Skyscrapers should be added too
With bridges, dams and planes;
And cars built on assembly lines
And railroad tracks and trains.

And let’s add toothpicks, wire and steel,
The printing press and phones,
And movies, photographs, and skis
And on and on and on.

Remember then, that engineers
More than any discipline
Design, create, and solve and build,
To make a world that’s never been.

Got a problem?
Need it solved?
Just call an engineer.

February 23, 2000

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