Japanese maples

Bill Butler’s heart and yard are rooted in the joys of the elegantly fluorescent Japanese maple

Story and photos By David Moore

Though 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.

When 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 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 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.

It was like the old TV commercial from the ‘70s … figuratively, Bill slapped his

Bill and Kaye have about 150 varieties of Japanese maples in their yard. Many of them grow in a raised terrace on the south and east sides of the house. Bill built the terrace using stones from old chimneys and barns.

forehead and said, “I could’ve had a V-8!” The more his Japanese maples grew, and the more his knowledge of them grew, the more he loved them.

He ordered 50 trees from a nursery in Oregon.

“I paid $250 for those trees,” Bill chuckles now. “And $87 for shipping. I’d put them in pots for a year or two then until I figured out where to plant them. I was pretty well took.”

“That’s when you got ‘the fever,’” Kaye says.

Besides Horace, Bill learned about grafting from Harold Johnson of Tallassee – famous for his talent in such circles – and other tips from Randal Holder.

As his collection of Japanese maples grew, he also started collecting rocks from two chimneys on the family property and from several old barns in Fairview. Bill used them to build low terrace walls in the yard, then hauled in fill dirt to create raised garden areas for his trees.

“We spent years plugging centipede grass in the yard,” laughs Kaye, “and dang if we didn’t dig it up. Even today, somebody will bring us a rock and we’ll put it out there.”

Youngest of four boys, Bill was born and grew up at the family homeplace in Fairview.

A concrete squirrel looks perfectly happy to be amongst the Butlers’ Japanese maples. At immediate right, a Red Dragon shows its colors. Center, is a view of Bill’s greenhouse area, where he does his grafting and growing. In the provided photo at top right, the Butlers are: son Scott (heads the ag program at Arab Junior High, wife Angela, son Martin Dyar) lives in Arab; Kaye and Bill; and son Sean (engineer with the state department of transportation, wife Jennifer) lives next door to his parents. Sean’s sons are a big help with the trees; they are Cody, second from top right in a provided photo, and Will, bottom photo.

“Doc Gross came out and delivered me,” he says.

His father, William Hershel – known as “WH” – was a carpenter.

“Bill is a good man,” says Kaye, “but Hershel Butler was the finest man I met in my whole life.”

Bill’s mother, Ruth, had a love of gardening.

“She taught me all I know,” he says. “We had a vegetable garden and flowers year around.”

Bill graduated from Fairview High in 1962 “lost for something to do” as a career.

He attended St. Bernard College for three semesters before announcing it just wasn’t for him.

When a Fairview coach told him Brown Engineering (now Teledyne Brown) in Huntsville was training draftsmen for the space program, Bill signed up. After training, he worked over nine years at GE.

Around that time, Bill also joined the National Guard and bought a new Cutlass Olds – two factors that continue to affect his life today.

Daughter of Hoy and Lois Greer, Kaye graduated from Hanceville High in 1964 and worked at the Belk Hudson clothing store in Cullman and later as buyer for the store in Huntsville. While living there, she often hung out at The Globe, where one day she spotted Bill.

“He came through with his National Guard uniform and a brand new Cutlass, and I thought he was a good looking man,” Kaye recalls. “I asked a friend at Belk, who knew him, to fix me up with him.

“I probably asked Bill for the first date. He was bashful – Lord, have mercy, he was bashful,” she laughs. “But I was impressed.”

“Evidently you were,” he says.

“In the car or you?”

“Both,” he grins.

Married in ’67, Kaye worked until their son, Sean, was born. By the time Bill left GE, Scott was born. They moved to Fairview so the boys would know their grandparents.

Bill went to work with Cullman Printing, which his brother Pelham had started with David Smith. He ran the offset printing press, did typesetting, shot negatives and was “a Jack of all trades.” Bill bought out his brother 1993, and he and David ran the shop until about 2005.

Shortly after moving to Fairview, Bill’s love of fall colors sprouted into a new hobby that soon bloomed into a side business. Once the person seeking to learn about Acer palmatum, Bill become the person to turn to for not just information on Japanese maples, but to buy them.

It’s not a get-rich-overnight-scheme.

“I was in the hole, in the red, for a long time before I sold any,” he laughs.

Most of his sales are trees he’s grafted. He does his grafting February to March and August to September. Prior to Covid, he grafted about 400 Japanese maples annually.

Bill might humbly tell you that his mentor, the late Harold Johnson was the king of grafting Japanese maples at least in Alabama, but Harold never had a YouTube video made of his talents. Bill has. (Google “grafting Japanese Maples with Bill Butler” to see his handiwork.)

A main reason for grafting, he says, is so you can be certain of a tree’s cultivar and color. Grafting removes any guesswork, and hardy stems and rootstock yield trees with strong characteristics. Grafting also allows the propagation of hybrids, something King Harold is known for.

Grafting involves attaching a small Japanese maple stem – or scion – from a known cultivar or variety, to hardy Acer palmatum rootstock. It’s the scion,

The Coral Bark Japanese maple – with coral-red stems – grows by the pergola in the backyard; it has green leaves during the spring and summer, that turn a yellow in the fall. At far left, tree blooms make seeds. Left, Bill used more old stones to create a Japanese maple, deep shaded sitting area on the side of the house. Above, an Acer joponicum Meigetsu grows in a planter, at least for now.

not the rootstock, that determines the cultivar.

To graft a small tree, Bill cuts a scion from his chosen cultivar, whittles the end, inserts that into a slice in the rootstock and binds it together with his artful touch.

He grows rootstock from seeds he picks in September. He refrigerates them until December, then removes them, places 50-75 seeds into a zipperlocked baggie with damp peat moss, then refrigerates the baggies.

“Kaye made me get my own refrigerator,” he says. “She didn’t like my seeds and peat moss in there with her lettuce.”

The seeds germinate in early March, popping out with tiny roots. Bill moves them into cups with potting soil and keeps them watered in a heated greenhouse until freezing weather ends. Incrementally transplanted into larger pots, the seedstock grows three or so years before grafting.

Bill also moves some of the rootstock to gallon pots and lets them mature.

“Some of them are as pretty as they can be,” he says. “But grafted trees sell better.”

As much as Bill loves growing Japanese maples, he also loves the friendships they’ve allowed him to grow locally and statewide. And their yard’s not only attracted busloads of horticulture students from Wallace State and Auburn University, but perfect strangers stop to shoot pictures.

Another thing about Japanese maples – they make wonderful and meaningful gifts. Most of their neighbors have Billgrown trees coloring their yards, and they also grow at Randal Shed Park and the prayer garden at their church, Fairview First Baptist.

“We’ve planted them for friends’ grandbabies and given them in memory of people,” Kaye says.

“We got better at giving them away than selling them,” Bill chuckles.

“We are not attention getters,” Kaye makes a point to say. “But we do want people to know about Japanese maples.”

That’s because everybody needs the joy and fluorescent wonder of a delicately elegant Japanese maple tree in their yard.