We recently took a day trip to Bellingrath Gardens, so I wanted to share photos from this beautiful place. It's a 65 acre estate.....where you can walk through expansive garden areas and you can tour the home too, if you'd like to as well. We did both the home and garden tour. Bellingrath Gardnes is located at 12401 Bellingrath Gardens Rd, Theodore, Al. (Just outside of Mobile AL.) You can click HERE to visit their official website.
These gardens were so beautiful and well kept, I fell in love with them....not only because of how beautiful they were but because of how they came about......
I took an excerpt from the website's history page, to introduce you to the type of person Mrs. Bessie Bellingrath was and how her gardens got started....
As the economic depression worsened, friends quietly kept Mrs. Bellingrath aware of families in need. She would appear checkbook in hand, begging for an azalea, camellia or whatever bloom she saw in the family yard. She would convince the stunned homeowner that Bellingrath Gardens had been unable to locate one and then offer hundreds of dollars in an era when the U.S. government declared that $25 per week was a comfortable income. (You can read the full page by clicking on the history link above).
These gardens are a very special place... a constant reminder of Bessie's passion for flowers, as well as her open heart for those in need.
They are truly breathtaking....we visited in June....Now on with the tour.....
We did take the home tour too, the home was stunning on the inside, there were so many antiques from all over the world. I didn't get any pictures, they were prohibited inside but we did buy a lot of post cards from the gift shop so we could remember it......
Below is some more information from the history page from their website:
Walter Bellingath married Bessie Mae Morse of Mobile in 1906. The couple had no children. After his wife's 1943 death Bellingrath dedicated the rest of his life to work on the gardens she had worked so hard to create. "These Gardens were my wife's dream," he once said, "and I want to live to see that dream come true."
In 1955, at his death at the age of 86, his estate had been converted over to the Bellingrath-Morse Foundation to oversee the operation of his beloved Gardens and to open his home to the public. Profits beyond those needed to operate Bellingrath Gardens and Home benefitted Central Presbyterian Church, St. Francis Methodist Church and provide scholarships at Huntington College in Montgomery, Ala., Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Rhodes College in Memphis (formerly Southwestern University).
This place is a lovely testimony of Walter and Bessie Bellingrath's love for nature, each other, and the love that they had for other people too...there's no doubt this place is truly blessed.
I hope you enjoyed the garden tour today....
Thanks for visiting!