Walter Bellingrath arrived in Mobile in 1903 after splitting a Coca-Cola bottling franchise with his brother William. He chose Mobile; William took other territories. It proved a shrewd bet. As Coca-Cola's popularity surged across the Southeast, Walter's operation flourished, and by 1917 he was wealthy enough that his doctor's advice to relax more led him to purchase a rustic fishing camp on the Fowl River, about 20 miles south of Mobile. He called it Belle Camp. But it was Bessie Mae Morse -- Walter's wife since 1906 and a former employee of the Mobile Coca-Cola Company -- who saw something beyond a place to cast a line. Bessie began planting azaleas and camellias in the rich Gulf Coast soil, and what started as a private hobby soon outgrew the couple's imagination.

By 1927, the Bellingraths had enlisted prominent Mobile architect George B. Rogers to formalize the grounds. The gardens expanded across 65 acres, and in 1935 Rogers designed the couple's 15-room, 10,500-square-foot home at the heart of the estate. The house is a study in architectural salvage and Southern resourcefulness. Its exterior bricks were handmade for the 1852 Mobile birthplace of Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont -- a socialite who married into two of America's wealthiest families. The ornamental ironwork came from the recently demolished Southern Hotel, also in Mobile. Rogers blended these reclaimed materials with a Georgian staircase, French doors, and a Mediterranean courtyard, creating what he described as an English Renaissance style. The result feels less like a single vision than a conversation between eras.

What sets Bellingrath apart from many public gardens is its refusal to go dormant. The Gulf Coast's mild winters allow year-round spectacle. Spring erupts with more than 250,000 azaleas -- a staggering figure that made the gardens a model for Mobile's famous Azalea Trail, established in 1929. Summer brings over 2,000 roses alongside hibiscus, bougainvillea, and caladiums. Fall features more than 8,000 chrysanthemums in bedded, potted, and cascading arrangements. Even winter keeps the grounds lively with tulips, snapdragons, pansies, daffodils, and poppies. Cabbage palmettos and live oaks provide permanent structure, their canopies dripping with the kind of Spanish moss that tells you exactly where in America you are standing.

The gardens opened to the public in 1932 and quickly became a pilgrimage site for horticulture enthusiasts. Bessie died in 1943, and Walter, determined to preserve what they had built together, established the Bellingrath-Morse Foundation in 1950 as a nonprofit trust for the estate's perpetual care. Today, the home operates as a museum, its rooms still furnished as the Bellingraths left them. The Magic Christmas in Lights display has earned national recognition -- USA Today placed it among the ten best public light displays in America in 2014. The site was listed on the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage in 1977 and on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. What began as one woman's azaleas at a fishing camp has become, across nearly a century, one of the South's defining gardens.