Gardeners across coastal Alabama will have a full slate of activities to look forward to the first weekend of April, as Mobile Botanical Gardens rolls out its popular Gallery of Gardens tour alongside a two-day visit from best-selling gardening author and television personality Brie Arthur. The Gallery of Gardens tour, one of the nonprofit garden’s signature spring fundraisers, will showcase five private residential gardens on Friday, April 5, and Saturday, April 6.
This year’s tour breaks from tradition by focusing entirely on waterfront properties in the area south of the city of Mobile known as the Peninsula of Mobile. Three of the featured gardens sit along Dog River, one borders Perch Creek, and another overlooks Mobile Bay. The concentration on one geographic pocket gives the tour a coherence past editions lacked: visitors move through a single, distinctive landscape where tidal water shapes everything from soil conditions to plant selection, and where the same salt air that challenges gardeners also produces some of the most dramatic waterfront settings in the city.
The Peninsula of Mobile is one of the area’s most ecologically interesting places, the low-lying land between Mobile Bay and the river systems that feed it. Gardens there contend with conditions ordinary city lots never face — brackish air, occasional tidal flooding, and the wind exposure that comes with open water — and the designs that thrive on that ground reflect generations of local adaptation.
Five Gardens, One Weekend
Organizers say the gardens on this year’s tour offer a wide range of styles, from a mature, shaded collection of camellias to a more recently installed and curated plant palette. Visitors can expect a mix of intimate garden nooks, open entertaining spaces, container plantings and decorative garden art. That range is deliberate. A tour built entirely around one neighborhood risks sameness, and organizers have emphasized that the five stops show what different generations of gardeners have done with comparable waterfront ground — one property a long accumulation of shade-loving classics, another a young garden with a fresh design vocabulary.
Camellias hold a particular place in Mobile gardening culture, and the Gulf Coast’s mild winters are the reason. The region sits in the heart of camellia country, where the large-flowered japonicas and fall-blooming sasanquas that northern gardeners grow as greenhouse plants flourish outdoors as landscape anchors, blooming through the season when little else shows color. A mature camellia collection on a shaded lot represents decades of patient growth, and tour visitors will see the kind of specimens that cannot be purchased at any nursery.
Peninsula docents will be stationed throughout the tour to speak to the area’s distinctive ecological features, while Mobile County Master Gardeners will be available to help visitors identify plants and answer horticultural questions. The two groups serve different purposes: the docents interpret the place itself, from the waterways to the wildlife corridors, while the Master Gardeners — volunteers trained through the Alabama Cooperative Extension System — field the practical questions about plant names, growing conditions and problems that gardeners bring to every tour.
Gardens will be open for touring from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Friday, April 5, and from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, April 6. Advance tickets and tour maps can be purchased online through Mobile Botanical Gardens or at the garden’s office, with same-day ticket sales also available at each tour stop. The two-day format lets visitors spread the five gardens across two days at a comfortable pace, an approach that distinguishes the Gallery of Gardens from single-morning tours.
A Trolley Option This Year
New this year, visitors can skip the driving and parking altogether by booking a seat on a guided trolley tour Saturday morning. The trolley package includes a stop for a bloody mary made from a recipe provided by Brie Arthur, a relaxed tour of the gardens, and a gourmet boxed lunch enjoyed at one of the bayfront properties before returning to Mobile Botanical Gardens in the early afternoon.
Waterfront tours carry parking challenges that inland tours never face, and the trolley addresses them directly while adding a social dimension the self-guided format lacks. Organizers note that trolley seating is limited and expected to sell out in advance, and past festival-style events at the garden have shown that the combination of limited seats, food, and a name speaker sells quickly. Visitors who want the trolley option are advised to book early rather than plan on buying seats the morning of the tour.
The boxed lunch at a bayfront property is an attraction in itself. Private waterfront gardens along Mobile Bay are rarely open to the public in any form, and the lunch stop gives trolley riders time in a setting most residents see only from the road or the water.
The Weekend’s Featured Guest
Arthur, the weekend’s featured guest, built her career studying landscape design and horticulture at Purdue University before spending more than a decade working as a grower and propagator at nurseries around the country. Now based in North Carolina, she is known for popularizing the concept of “foodscaping,” or blending edible plants into ornamental landscaping, and appears regularly as a correspondent on the PBS series “Growing a Greener World.”
Foodscaping — the idea that a tomato plant or a bed of kale can be as beautiful in a front yard as any shrub border — has moved from fringe idea to mainstream garden practice in the past decade, and Arthur has been one of its most visible advocates. Her argument is practical as much as aesthetic: American suburban yards hold an enormous amount of unused growing space, and integrating edibles into existing ornamental landscapes lets gardeners harvest food without dedicating a separate, often unsightly vegetable plot.
Her first book, “The Foodscape Revolution,” became an Amazon best seller, and in 2017 the American Horticultural Society named her its first-ever recipient of the Emerging Horticulture Professional award. A second book, “Gardening with Grains,” is expected to be released later this year. The AHS honor, given to a rising professional in the horticulture field, marked her as one of the industry’s most promising younger voices, and her rapid move from nursery growing to national television reflects the appetite for accessible, practical gardening guidance.
A Birthday Weekend in the Azalea City
Arthur’s visit to Mobile Botanical Gardens will also mark her 40th birthday weekend, and she has said she is looking forward to celebrating in the Azalea City. The nickname Mobile has carried for generations fits the occasion — the city’s spring azalea displays are among the oldest and most celebrated in the South, and a horticulturist choosing to spend a milestone birthday among Mobile’s gardens says something about how the region is regarded in the plant world.
Her programming will focus on practical ways home gardeners can grow more of their own food and flowers, including tips for engaging children in the garden, making use of small spaces with containers and patio-friendly aeroponic systems, vertical growing techniques, and alternatives to traditional mulching. Each of those topics targets a barrier that keeps people out of the garden: the belief that gardening requires land, the difficulty of holding a child’s interest, the physical limits of small patios, and the labor that conventional mulching demands year after year.
The emphasis on children and small spaces reflects the direction home gardening has taken. Younger gardeners arrive from apartments and townhouses rather than quarter-acre lots, and the techniques Arthur teaches — vertical structures that grow upward, containers and soilless patio systems that grow anywhere — are aimed squarely at them. Her message that a productive garden can live on a balcony is one the Mobile Botanical Gardens audience, spanning experienced Master Gardeners to first-time plant buyers, can each use at a different scale.
Friday Night at the Garden
The weekend kicks off Friday, April 5, at 4:30 p.m. with a casual, family-friendly planting event on the Herb Garden hillside at Mobile Botanical Gardens, where Arthur will help install a foodscaping demonstration by tucking edible plants in among existing trees, shrubs and perennials. Attendees are invited to take part in the planting, which will be followed by a farm-to-table sampling featuring locally grown fruits, vegetables and herbs.
The hillside planting doubles as a permanent teaching feature: once installed, the foodscaping demonstration will show visitors year-round how edibles perform in an ornamental Gulf Coast landscape, in exactly the design context Arthur’s books describe. For attendees who help plant it, the garden will hold a personal connection every time they return.
Later that evening, at 7 p.m., Arthur will give a presentation on “The Foodscape Revolution” as part of the garden’s Marion Deane Drummond speaker series, followed by a book signing and dessert reception. The Drummond series has long brought notable garden speakers to Mobile, and Arthur’s appearance continues a tradition that connects the local gardening community with national horticulture figures. The book signing gives attendees the chance to take home the best seller behind the talk, and the dessert reception keeps the evening social rather than strictly educational.
More for Gardeners This Spring
Beyond the Gallery of Gardens weekend, several other gardening-related events are on the calendar for area residents this spring. Bellingrath Gardens in Theodore will host an Easter Egg Hunt and breakfast with the Easter Bunny on Saturday, April 13, with separate hunts organized by age group; breakfast reservations can be made by calling the gardens. Bellingrath’s spring display — one of the largest azalea shows in the region — provides the backdrop for the event, and the age-group structure keeps the hunts manageable for both toddlers and older children.
And for homeowners looking to improve their lawns, a two-night “Turf School” covering the do’s and don’ts of grass care will be held April 15-16 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Jon Archer Center on Schillinger Road North in Mobile. The $10 registration fee covers a meal both nights, and organizers ask that participants register by April 9. The Archer Agricultural Center, home to Mobile County’s Extension office programming, is the natural venue for the school, which addresses the questions Extension agents field most often from Gulf Coast homeowners — fertilizer timing, weed control, watering and the diseases that thrive in the region’s humidity.
Between a waterfront garden tour, a national gardening personality, a children’s celebration at Bellingrath and a practical lawn course, the spring calendar offers something for nearly every level of Gulf Coast gardener. Additional details and ticket information for the Gallery of Gardens tour and Brie Arthur’s appearances are available through Mobile Botanical Gardens.