Bill Strain has brought up millions of boxwoods and other shrubs over more than four decades as a nurseryman.

Some time this month, Strain will arrive around sunrise at Strain & Sons Nursery off U.S. 31 in Athens, breathe in the fresh, loamy soil and the humidity-fogged greenhouses for the last time.

After 45 years of being tied to the nursery, he will finally have some free time.

“I hope to travel around a little,” Strain said, “And I do sporting clays for a hobby, so I will be going to some tournaments.”

Thankful

Operating a nursery all these years has required an enormous amount of work and dedication; plants are always needing something. Strain said the nursery wouldn’t have worked without Anthony England and Jimmy McGucken, the two men who have handled day-to-day operations at the greenhouses for the past 25 years.

“I couldn’t have made it without them,” he said. “A lot of the things would not have come to fruition if I wouldn’t have had them. They made the place work.”

Looking back, it was the people, not the plants, that Strain loved most about being a nurseryman.

“The best thing about being in the business are the people I’ve met,” he said. “I met nursery people who were not shy about sharing their methods on planting and propagating. The folks I met in the nursery business, a lot of those folks became good friends. That’s what I’ll miss the most.”

Family

Strain, an Athens High School football standout under coach Larry McCoy in the early 1970s, and his wife, Deborah, an Elkmont native, met while attending the University of North Alabama together. Strain was playing strong-side linebacker on a full-ride scholarship to UNA, while his wife was a cheerleader for the school.

“I got to know her on campus,” Strain said, who graduated from Athens High in 1970 and from UNA in 1974.

Strain hoped one of his children would carry on the family nursery business, but they had other interests.

“They say it is common for family businesses to last three generations,” Strain said. “I am the third generation.”

History

Strain’s grandfather, Thomas Strain, began the nursery in the 1930s and sold plants during the Great Depression. Even though at the time half the country was out of work, people still bought plants, especially those that bloomed, “to brighten up their lives,” Strain said.

Strain’s father, Douglas Strain, worked for his brother, Hayden, a horticulture graduate from Clemson University. After working a year with him and “learning a lot,” Douglas Strain moved to Strain & Sons current location at U.S. 31 and Strain Road.

“He had 20 or 30 rows of boxwoods here,” Strain said. “After I got home from church, I had to work on the boxwoods.”

From there, the business just grew and grew.

“I spent my whole life here on this 140 acres,” Strain said. “I roamed all of it. It was a great place to grow up as a kid.”

Hugh, Douglas’ brother, ran the greenhouse side, and Douglas ran a landscaping business in Huntsville that provided plant material for the growing number of homes being built during the Werner Von Braun and space race era.

“He landscaped Von Braun’s very first house,” Strain said of his father.

His dad and Uncle Hugh split Strain & Sons up in 1972.

Bill said he remembered that he started working at the greenhouse in the summers when he was just 14.

“I was glad to see school start,” he laughed.

Strain earned a degree in business administration from UNA and put it to work expanding the business and its customer base.

Early on, Strain realized it was more profitable to sell to independent garden centers and wholesalers — customers who might want 500 green velvet boxwoods — rather than individual customers like the ones who shop Lowe’s or Home Depot looking to spruce up their yards on the weekends. For the most part, Strain & Sons sold boxwoods, ornamental grasses, azaleas, viburnum and nandinas.

Winter of life

Day by day, the green boxwoods and red nandinas at Strain & Sons slowly disappear from the rows upon rows upon rows of greenhouses. Eventually, Strain says the plants, the greenhouses, everything, will disappear. New development — maybe a subdivision — will someday replace the peaceful, green cycle of nature that has gone on here for decades. The millions of scrappy boxwood cuttings that erupted in every nook and cranny of some of the greenhouses just a few months ago will be gone, too.

Later this month, or whenever he can sell all of his plant material to wholesalers — not individuals — Strain will close up shop for the last time.

Service, awards

In addition to running his nursery all these years, Strain also found time to serve his community over the years. He was an Athens school board member for 10 years, from 1993 to 2003. In 1998, he served as president of the Alabama Nurseries Association.

He was in the National Guard and the Army Reserves for 21 years, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. For 36 years, Strain has been a member of Athens Rotary Club, even serving as its president. Rotary is an international service organization aimed at bringing business and professional leaders together to offer humanitarian service and to advance goodwill and peace around the world. Strain said one of Rotary’s main goals is to eradicate polio in remote countries throughout the world.

In 2018, Athens Rotary Club gave Strain the Martin-Young Lifetime Achievement Award for his service to the community. The Martin-Young Fellowship also included a $1,000 donation by the local Rotary Club to The Rotary Foundation in Strain’s honor.

Doug Gates, a lifelong friend of Strain’s, credits the nurseryman with thanklessly donating shrubs and other plant material to various community projects.

“He hardly gets any credit for it, but he continues to do it,” Gates said. “I’ve known him for 37 years or better, and he is very quiet and modest, but the things I’ve seen him do for the community over the years hardly anyone knows about. That’s just the kind of person he is.”