HUNTSVILLE, Alabama — Bill Nance’s influence is all around Huntsville, though you may not know it. Walk down any street in the city’s historic districts and you’ll see his touch in the lovely landscapes that grace many of the homes.
“Bill did that garden, and that one, and this one has a beautiful garden out back that he did,” Lakin Boyd said last week as he drove along Eustis Street and turned on White Circle.
There’s the Chandler home with its gracious gardens on Echols Avenue, Boyd said, and the magnificent grounds of the mansion that was home to Leroy Pope, the “Father of Huntsville,” and now to Danny Wiginton.
When Bill Nance died April 27 of apparent heart failure, he left behind this body of living art.
“Bill’s genius,” said Boyd, his friend of 48 years, “was in conceptualizing space and planting the garden with appropriate plants.”
Long before he became known for his garden designs, Nance was an artist and teacher. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Alabama, where he and Boyd met in 1964, and a Master of Arts in Crafts from the Instituto de Allende in San Miquel de Allende, Mexico. Nance taught art first on a high school level and then for 32 years at Alabama AM University.
It was only after he bought a bungalow in the Old Town Historic District in 1980 that he began his self-study of horticulture. He became an expert, often through trial and error, on what plants worked well here, Boyd said.
His artist’s eye, however, was what made Nance’s gardens special. He understood form and function and used plants such as boxwoods and tall columns of arbor vitae to give structure and texture to outdoor spaces. His own garden is a case in point.
A visitor first meets a copper “sun face,” which Nance made, on the garden gate. You could, if you wish, ring the exotic whirling dervish bell Nance bought in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, Turkey, before entering.
Once inside “the foyer, as he would call it,” Boyd said, you are met with a sense of instant calm. A wall of cherry laurels, another Nance favorite, provides a screen from the very close neighbor next door. To the left, is a newly installed tall palladian-shaped mirror that reflects the length of the garden along the side of the house.
A statue of Pan is in front of you, one of the bits of whimsy tucked in the curved pathways of brick pavers that Nance laid himself. An enormous bottle tree of Nance’s own design anchors a back corner, and a new addition – a terra cotta bust from the old Morris Hotel, torn down years ago in Birmingham – sits to the right of the lovely garden house Nance also designed.
The bust was willed to Nance by his long-time friend, John Rison Jones, who passed away in 2008. Nance had recently incorporated the bust into a tall pillar and painted and antiqued the surface to resemble a piece of ancient statuary.
Incorporating pieces of statues into other media is something Nance picked up on a trip he and Boyd made to Turkey, Boyd said. Inspiration from other trips to China, Italy, France, India, Bali and Mexico, among other places, often made its way into his gardens and his art.
The history of Huntsville also influenced Nance’s designs, Boyd said, and he loved to add plants that had been used in antebellum gardens of the South to his spaces.
All of Nance’s gardens have “rooms” designated by an arbor entry or, as in his own garden, a small circle of grass in the midst of curving walkways. The eye is always led to the next space or planting. Benches are placed around the garden to give a place to ponder life or watch the birds that flock to the quiet space.
Nance’s gardens are never a riot of color, but instead an oasis of green and white, his favorite color combination. His home garden has strategically placed, massive oak leaf hydrangeas with tall plumes of white flowers. A sweep of white lacecap hydrangeas will soon open into white bouquets.
Nance’s garden has been featured on the cover of Southern Living and in Horticulture magazine, which printed a detailed drawing Nance did of his garden design. Boyd remembers the Horticulture staff saying the drawing was one of the most beautiful things they had ever seen.
The vision and the precision of the artist is in the drawing and in the live translation of the drawing. As he said in the landscape book that Southern Living produced featuring Nance’s garden, design is key to any successful garden.
Nance thought one of the greatest mistakes people make when planting a garden is not to plan for the future, Boyd said. Gardens need time to mature, and he would often look at a newly landscaped space and say “they need to take every other plant out,” Boyd said.
He also believed in using what he called “drifts” of plants, such as the curving line of azaleas at a home on Williams Avenue and the sweep of hydrangeas at the little park at the corner of California and White streets.
“First you create the lines,” he was quoted saying, “then you go back with an eraser and soften the edges. The flowers erase the visible lines, but the basic geometry of the design is still there.”
Donna Castellano came to understand Nance’s genius when she convinced him to help her with her book, “Through the Garden Gate,” which celebrates some of the garden of the historic districts.
“I can’t tell you what it was like to go into a garden and then have someone with Bill’s expertise explain it to you,” Castellano said. “You began to see the complexity of those places.”
Despite his significant influence on the gardens of Huntsville, Nance didn’t have a formal landscaping business. He often helped friends in their gardens and in one case the only payment was a chocolate cake – his request, Boyd said.
Two of his most recent projects were for Joel Anderson, co-founder of the Books-A-Million chain, and the Burritt Museum. He was a hands-on gardener who oversaw the installation of every project, Boyd said, and he always treated everyone with kindness.
Almost 300 people came to a reception at the Huntsville Museum of Art last week to honor Nance’s memory, and many talked about his sharing of plants and advice.
“He never said no to anybody,” one woman said.
Nance devoted so much time to garden design that he didn’t spend as much time with his art as Boyd thought he should. His paintings, drawings and papier mache sculptures all attest to a gifted artist.
“I was always encouraging him to make more art,” said David Reyes, the curator of collections at the Huntsville Museum of Art.
Nance donated two pieces of his artwork to the museum’s recent gala auction, both of which sold quickly, Boyd said.
While Nance’s legacy will live on in the dozens of gracious gardens he designed, Boyd hopes his great friend’s love of art will also be honored. His obituary requests that memorials be made to the museum’s art acquisition fund.
“I hoped, in the end, his celebrity could raise money for an institution he loved,” Boyd said.
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