It was a curious fact that inspired Boy Scout and Rome High School sophomore Pierce Henson’s Eagle Scout project.

He’d heard that there was not a single myrtle on Myrtle Hill Cemetery overlooking the downtown skyline. So when it came time to complete the work to finish his badge, he decided to do something about it.

“If you think about it, Myrtle Hill Cemetery is a very historic landmark,” Pierce said. “And there used to be myrtle all over the hill.”

Pierce gathered with his fellow scouts from Troop 113 that meets at First United Methodist Church to plant both myrtle and knockout roses Saturday next to the just finished Sexton’s House, and afterward celebrated the completion of his project with lunch with friends and family.

Community volunteer Anne Culpepper, who leads tours of Myrtle Hill Cemetery, said she was glad that Pierce could bring the myrtle back to the cemetery’s landscape.

“Now I can bring classes up here and show them what a myrtle looks like,” Culpepper said. “And it’s appropriate that he’s planting them here since he has family buried on the hill.”

At 15, Pierce already has ambitions to seek higher education. He said he’s undecided between attending Georgia Tech or Carnegie Mellon University and he hopes to major either in robotic or biomedical engineering.

“I want to be a Disney imagineer, so I have to have some place to start off,” he said.

He said he was glad to be near completing gaining the rank of Eagle Scout.

“All of the work I’ve done up to this point is paying off,” he said.

The son of Alicia and Scott Henson Jr., the Rome High School sophomore is also involved in both the Rome High School Marching and Symphonic bands, takes all college preparatory advanced classes and is an honor roll student.

Pierce is also a member of the Science Olympiad and the Future Business Leaders of America and has previously involved himself in the Science and Spanish clubs at Rome High.