Bellingrath Gardens Named Among the World’s Top Gardens Worth Travelling For

International Garden Tourism Conference Recognizes Mobile County Landmark

Bellingrath Gardens and Home in Theodore has earned a prestigious global honor, being named one of 12 gardens singled out as Gardens of the World Worth Travelling For in 2024 at the International Garden Tourism Conference held in Victoria, British Columbia. The announcement came from International Garden Tourism Network Chair Ibo Guelsen, who praised the 2023 recipients for their outstanding contributions to the garden tourism landscape.

Bellingrath was one of just a dozen properties worldwide to receive the distinction, placing it alongside some of the best-known botanical destinations on the globe. In the spirit of highlighting the world’s most dynamic garden experiences, the International Garden Tourism Network selects gardens that combine horticultural beauty with a compelling visitor experience. Bellingrath’s inclusion on the list underscores the Theodore attraction’s appeal to an international audience well beyond its traditional Gulf Coast fan base.

For a 65-acre garden on a river south of Mobile, the recognition places the property in company it has rarely shared. The network’s list reads as a traveler’s index of the world’s botanical greats, and appearing on it signals to an international audience of garden lovers, tour operators and travel writers that a visit to the Gulf Coast warrants a stop that once would have been considered a regional detour.

The honor also reflects a shift in how the industry measures a garden’s stature. Attendance figures matter, but the International Garden Tourism Network’s criteria center on the quality of the visitor experience — the design of the grounds, the calendar of seasonal highlights, the care of the collections and the sense that a garden rewards repeated visits across the year. By those measures, Bellingrath’s year-round programming has quietly built the kind of destination reputation that international juries notice.

A Mobile County Treasure With Historic Roots

Bellingrath Gardens and Home sits on 65 acres along the Fowl River, just south of Mobile. The property was originally developed in the 1930s by Mobile industrialist Walter Bellingrath and his wife Bessie, who opened the gardens to the public in 1932. The Bellingrath home, built in 1935, remains a major draw, showcasing the family’s original antique furniture and personal collections.

The garden’s origin story is one of the Gulf Coast’s favorites. Walter Bellingrath made his fortune as Mobile’s first Coca-Cola bottler, and the couple’s fishing camp on the Fowl River grew, under Bessie’s direction, into a showplace of azaleas, camellias and roses. By the time the gates opened to the public in the depths of the Great Depression, the spring azalea display was already drawing visitors by the thousands — so many, in the early years, that special trains ran from Mobile to carry them the short trip south to Theodore.

Today the gardens are one of the top tourism attractions in Mobile County, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors annually for year-round blooms, seasonal events and the popular Magic Christmas in Lights holiday display. The property’s combination of manicured gardens, historic architecture and river-front scenery has made it a signature destination for the region.

The International Garden Tourism Network presents these awards as part of its broader mission to connect the worlds of garden tourism and travel. Dr. Richard Benfield led the selection jury of four members.

Why Garden Tourism Matters to the Gulf Coast

Garden tourism is a bigger slice of the travel economy than most residents realize. Millions of travelers in North America plan trips around botanical gardens, arboretums and flower festivals, spending on lodging, restaurants and other attractions along the way. The travelers tend to be older, stay longer and travel in the shoulder seasons when traditional beach tourism slows — exactly the visitors a destination like the Alabama Gulf Coast wants in March, September and December.

Bellingrath’s calendar is built for that audience. Spring brings the azalea and rose displays that made the garden famous; summer fills the grounds with tropical color and butterfly activity; fall delivers chrysanthemums and the cooling river air; and winter belongs to Magic Christmas in Lights, the evening display that turns the property into one of the region’s defining holiday attractions. The result is a garden with no true off-season, a quality the international network has repeatedly rewarded.

The recognition also carries practical weight for the region’s tourism economy. Being named among the world’s gardens worth traveling for gives Visit Mobile and the state’s tourism promoters an international credential to build campaigns around, and it positions the garden within itineraries that otherwise never include the central Gulf Coast. For a county whose tourism identity rests heavily on beaches, the honor diversifies the story the area tells.

The Garden’s Place in Mobile’s History

Bellingrath has long been more than an attraction; it is part of how Mobile understands itself. The gardens opened only a few years after the city’s azalea tradition took root, when Mobile founded its Azalea Trail and embraced the flowering shrub as a civic symbol. Generations of Mobilians have taken their spring portraits, school outings and visiting relatives down the same paths, and the garden’s archives hold a century of the region’s social history alongside its plant records.

The Bellingrath home itself anchors that history. Built in 1935 and furnished with the family’s original antiques and collections, the house tour offers a look at how one of Mobile’s most successful industrial families lived, from the porcelain and glassware collected across decades to the riverfront setting the couple chose for their retirement project. Docent-led tours run alongside the garden admission, and the home remains, for many visitors, the surprise highlight of a visit planned for the flowers.

Walter Bellingrath lived to see the garden become a public institution, and his wife’s horticultural ambition is still visible in the plantings that define the grounds. The estate passed into a foundation charged with preserving and operating the property, which has kept the gardens open to the public continuously since the early 1930s — a longevity few American gardens can match, and one of the quiet credentials behind the international honor.

The Network Behind the Award

The International Garden Tourism Network operates as a global coalition of gardens, destinations and travel professionals working to grow the garden tourism market and to recognize the properties that define it. Its annual conference, hosted this year in Victoria, British Columbia — a city whose own Butchart Gardens rank among the world’s most celebrated — draws garden directors, tourism officials and researchers from around the world, and the announcement of the year’s honored gardens is among the event’s most anticipated moments.

The network’s selection process, led this year by a jury of four under Dr. Richard Benfield, weighs the qualities that make a garden a destination rather than a stop: the distinctiveness of its collections, the strength of its seasonal programming, the quality of the visitor experience from arrival to exit, and the garden’s role in its community. Benfield, a geographer who has written extensively on garden tourism as an economic force, has spent years documenting how gardens drive travel spending, and the network’s awards reflect that research-backed view of the industry.

Being named alongside the world’s leading botanical destinations also raises the bar for Bellingrath’s own future. The properties on the network’s lists tend to see their international profile rise, with tour operators adding them to itineraries and travel media seeking them out. For the Theodore property, whose audience has historically drawn from Mobile County, Baldwin County and the wider Gulf South, the coming seasons will test how far that recognition travels.

Planning a Visit

The garden’s year-round calendar rewards timing. The spring azalea season remains the classic visit, when the terraces along the Fowl River blaze in blooms the Bellingraths planted nine decades ago; summer’s roses and tropical beds carry the color through the slower months; and the Christmas display, with its millions of lights along the garden paths, has become a multi-generational tradition for families across the Gulf Coast.

Visitors can tour the home with guides who know the family’s story, wander the birding boardwalk that follows the river’s edge, and time a return trip for the seasonal festivals the garden schedules throughout the year. For out-of-town travelers, the garden sits close enough to Mobile’s attractions and the Baldwin County beaches to anchor a full Gulf Coast itinerary — a fact that the international recognition is likely to make known to many more of them.

Nine decades after Walter and Bessie Bellingrath opened their fishing camp to the public, the garden they built has been told it belongs among the twelve gardens on Earth most worth traveling for. The couple, by every account, would have considered the plants themselves reward enough. Mobile County gets to keep both: the living collection they left behind, and now, formally, the world’s attention to it.