Bill Butler’s heart and yard are rooted in the joys of the elegantly fluorescent Japanese maple Story and photos By David Moore
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hough shy about personal attention, Bill Butler is known far beyond Fairview’s town limits for the scores of Japanese maples that paint their leaves from a threeseason palette. Ditto for his expertise in growing and grafting the delicately elegant trees. Like those trees, Bill’s life and heart are rooted in Fairview, but his love of radiant fall colors stem from the five years he and his wife Kaye lived in Huntsville. Reaching that house required driving by the historic district, full of sugar maples and other trees rich in fall color. “It would be like driving through fluorescent colors,” Bill says. “It still is,” Kaye agrees. “We ride up there and look at them today.” The Butlers lived there 1969-1972 while Bill worked for General Electric drafting plans for the Saturn V ground support system. Staying with GE, however, would have required transferring to South Carolina – not what they wanted. So in 1971 they began building a house on the far end of family property in Fairview that runs from Butler Street north along Wesley Avenue. “Best decision we ever made, moving back and raising the kids here,” Kaye says.
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hen they moved in 1972, Bill packed along his love of fall colors, and within a year he’d planted a sugar maple near the front door. Not only did the expected colors fail to materialize, but the tree died in a season or two. Determined to find the right trees with 60
the right colors, Bill made inquiries to landscape teacher Kenneth “Roy” Ball at Wallace State Community College and others. “I probably got on Roy’s nerves dropping by all the time,” Bill grins. But he lucked out. One day at Wallace, while discussing fall colors, Horace Smith, who operated a nursery west of Hanceville, overheard Bill’s conversation. “Butler,” Horace said, “if you are
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looking for color, Japanese maples have spring color, summer color and fall color.” So Bill bought a grafted Bloodgood red Japanese maple – Acer palmatum is the species name – from Horace, and that was that. Like his mother, Bill enjoyed working outside, and soon had several Japanese maples taking colorful root.
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t was like the old TV commercial from the ‘70s … figuratively, Bill slapped his
