In 1949 invitations were sent for an 80th birthday party for Walter Bellingrath. A makeshift stage of bamboo held Mr. Bellingrath and some family members backing up to the Home while nearly 500 seated guests filled the driveway area in front of what today is the Delchamps Gallery. 

To the guests’ amusement, his young nephew and namesake, Walter Bellingrath Edgar appeared costumed like the Sprite Boy. That character had been created in 1942 by illustrator Howard Sundblom who had earlier drawn the familiar Santa Claus image. The Sprite Boy led to the official adoption of “Coke” alongside Coca-Cola. 

Walter was pulling his red wagon and in the bed of that wagon was another surprise for his 80 year old uncle: 16 engraved sterling silver loving cups. Judge Ben Turner read a list of the donors while young Robert Edington read the actual inscriptions on each: 

1. The State of Alabama, James E. Folsom, Governor.

2. In Recognition of his Outstanding Service to Mobile County, Board of Revenue and Road Commissioners, Mobile County, Alabama 

3. In This Symbol We Express To You Our Appreciation of Your High Ideals of Civic Service, Board of Commissioners, City of Mobile 

4. Your Montgomery Kith and Kin Salute You, and Wish You Many Happy Returns of the Day on this, Your 80th Birthday. Mary, Elmore, Jean, Suzanne, and Stanhope. (Editor’s note: Walter Belllingrath’s sister-in-law Mary Elmore Bellingrath (1876-1955), daughters, Elmore Bartlett (1911-1992), Jean Lane (1916-1994) and Suzanne von Gal (1920-1991). Stanhope was a brother of Mary Bellingrath and was Secretary-Treasurer of Montgomery Coca-Cola Bottling Co.) 

5. With Love and Appreciation for your Accomplishments as a Bottler of Coca-Cola, Floriculturist, and Christian Benefactor. Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Arkansas, by: Mrs. T. L. Bellingrath and Family: Carl, Edward, Ruth, Maude and Elsie. (Editor’s note: Mrs. T. L. Bellingrath was Walter Bellingrath’s sister-in-law, Maude (1890-1954), widow of his brother Theodore Leon (1864-1919). Her children were Carl (1896-1953), Edward (1908-1949), Ruth Hall(1901-1992), Maude Silverman (1904-1982) and the youngest, Elsie Stebbins (1913-2011). 

6. Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Selma (Owned by his sister Kate) 

7. Associates and Employees of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company, Mobile, Alabama. 

8. Executives and Employees of Bellingrath Gardens. 

9. Officers and Employees of Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Frisco City (owned by W. D. Bellingrath) 

10. Employees of Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Biloxi (Also owned by W. D. Bellingrath) 

11. Harry Crawford & Associates (Advertising agency with offices in Mobile and Montgomery) 

12. Mobile Press-Register (Mr. Bellingrath worked to establish the Mobile Press in 1929. It later absorbed the older Mobile Register.) 

13. Radio Station WABB (established by the Mobile Press-Register on June 19, 1948 and owned by the newspaper until 1959.) 

14. I. B. Tigrett, President of the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Railroad. Isaac Burton Tigrett (1879-1954) oversaw the merger of the Gulf, Mobile and Northern Railroad with the Mobile and Ohio Railroad in 1940 to create the G. M. & O which he presided over until 1952. Mr. Tigrett’s great nephew and namesake founded the Hard Rock Café chain. 

15. Lerio Corporation, originally founded as the Lerio Patent Cup Co. in 1914 by Louis J. Lerio who successfully patented several types of equipment used in the collection of turpentine. Mr. Bellingrath was an investor in the firm and became its president after Mr. Lerio’s death in 1942. 

16. The First National Bank. Walter Bellingrath was a director of the bank for many years and it handled the trust he created. 

A Special Certificate 

The loving cups are on display on the Riverside Dining Porch with another gift presented to Mr. Bell in 1949: a special hand colored certificate from the Liquid Carbonic Corporation which had invented a low pressure method of filling glass bottles with carbonated beverages. The new method reduced the chances of bottles exploding under pressure. Walter Bellingrath purchased the very first system and they sought to honor him for that long relationship. The company is still in existence today as a branch of Praxair. We are grateful for the Mobile Coca-Cola Company for donating this certificate back to Bellingrath Gardens and Home.  

Steve Crawford spent decades serving as a Board Member and Board Chair of the Bellingrath-Morse Foundation. Out of his love for the Gardens and Home, he included a $25,000 gift in his will. That donation played an important role in the recent restoration of the Summer House and will be honored in a ceremony this fall.

As an attorney, Mr. Crawford understood that he could make a significant gift at the end of his life. It’s fitting that the contribution supported the first project of our Centennial Master Plan. Restoring one of the original structures from the Gardens reminds us that each generation plays a part in preserving the Bellingrath legacy.

Like Steve Crawford, you can make one of your largest gifts through your estate plans. You’ll be able to meet your family’s financial needs while showing your love of the Gardens, the region’s history, STEM education, art, nature, and lifelong learning. We have many opportunities for you to make a lasting impact for generations to come!

The simplest way to make a planned gift is to include a bequest in your will. Still, there are a variety of options, including naming Bellingrath as a beneficiary of a life insurance policy or investment account. Your financial advisor can provide more information.

To discuss a possible planned gift to Bellingrath, please get in touch with Cory Sparks, Ph.D., at [email protected] or (251) 873-1378.

On August 8, we will celebrate Mr. Bellingrath’s birthday. Born in Atlanta in 1869, 157 years ago, his mark and legacy lives on with Bellingrath Gardens & Home, the estate garden that he and his beloved wife, Bessie Morse Bellingrath, created in the first half of the 20^th Century. Bellingrath’s own Tom McGehee has written aplenty about Mr. Bellingrath, and I will not attempt to weave a tale as good as Tom could in describing our founder. However, I would like to add some context as to what has been created and why it is so important.

Walter D. Bellingrath is not only our founder, but, of course, he was a Mobile icon – a successful businessman, a community pillar, and an inspirational figure and mentor to so many of his contemporaries. I’ve often said that he was a marketing genius both of his time and ahead of his time. He also was bold in his pursuits, a man who understood the principles of risk (both good and bad), and because of these traits, he was able to excel.

In 1949, Mr. Bellingrath set up the Bellingrath-Morse Foundation, a legal instrument meant to perpetuate the gardens that Bessie Bellingrath had started. In this extraordinary act of generosity in establishing the Foundation so that Bellingrath Gardens would live on past his death, Mr. Bellingrath set in motion something that rarely happens – the creation of something that can give back to its community, through its continuance, for inspiration, mental and spiritual fulfillment, pleasure, and civic-mindedness. That Bellingrath Gardens & Home provides these things, and more, to our visitors, members, and patrons, is a given. But, today’s BGH would not exist were it not for Mr. Bellingrath’s generosity and forward thinking in 1949. And, therefore, in this regard, Walter D. Bellingrath stands among a select group of people who have changed the course of American horticulture, public garden, and historic estate home genres, each in their own cities.

Viewed through this lens, then, here are three peers of Mr. Bellingrath. Please think of these fellow garden/estate founders as being pioneers, just as with Mr. Bellingrath, for their own communities.

1. Henry Shaw of St. Louis, Missouri – Mr. Shaw, who lived well before Walter Bellingrath’s time, was a profitable businessman and community figure in the first half of the 1800s. After visiting prominent English and European gardens through the 1840s, just as with the Bellingraths six decades later, Shaw was inspired to build a country estate and gardens. By 1859, these gardens opened to the public and would later become known as the world-famous Missouri Botanical Garden.

2. Alfred B. Maclay of Tallahassee, Florida – Mr. Maclay, born only two years after Walter Bellingrath, was a successful New York financier and banker. Through visits to Leon County, Florida, where his wife Louise had visited family on many occasions, he fell in love with the area’s trees – oaks, dogwoods, hollies, and pines. This culminated in his creation of a flower garden filled with camellias and azaleas, among other plants. After he died in 1944, Louise and their children donated the gardens to Florida to serve as a memorial to Mr. Maclay and his floral legacy. Today, these are named the Alfred B. Maclay Gardens State Park.

3. Harry P. Leu of Orlando, Florida – Mr. Leu, born 15 years after Mr. Bellingrath, was also a successful businessman and a civic leader in his community. By 1936, he and his wife Mary Jane had purchased property that contained a 1920’s era collection of camellias. By the 1940s, the Leus traveled the world, often returning with new ornamental plants, and especially camellias, to develop their garden. In 1961, they gifted the gardens to the City of Orlando. Today, this is the Harry P. Leu Gardens.

Through this telling of our founder’s significance, and through you reading about other “Walter Bellingraths” of their respective communities, it is my hope that you will never forget the gift of Bellingrath Gardens & Home. Walter D. Bellingrath, through his giving and philanthropy, set up this historic estate garden as a permanent feature of the Mobile community, and also of the greater Gulf Coast region, for generations beyond his time and even beyond ours.

Most locals of a certain age in Lower Alabama remember the days when the fields you’d see driving through the country were covered in dense prairies of native wildflowers, or were still open, grassy savannas dotted heavily with towering longleaf pine trees. Even the drainage ditches down the sides of the dirt roads were full to the brim with a color, shape, and texture we can hardly imagine today. What most people don’t know is what some of those wild plants were, and the answer might surprise you: Alabama is not only home to over 30 species of native carnivorous plants, but also boasts the honor of being the center of diversity for the iconic showy pitcher plants in the genus Sarracenia.

Our pitcher plants are truly marvels. They’ve evolved over millions of years to exploit the relative scarcity of competition in some of Alabama’s harshest environments, from permanently wet, acidic bogs, open to the blazing sun, to bald granite outcroppings hidden in dense forests, with hardly any soil at all. Their survival strategy is to seek their nutrition elsewhere, since so little exists in the soil, and so they’ve become hunters. Pitcher plants have developed some of the most remarkably sophisticated, colorful, and wonderfully patterned leaves of any native plant, complete with an offering of sweet nectar, all for the purpose of attracting, trapping, and eventually digesting their insect prey. The nectar of some species of Sarracenia even contains the drug coniine, which dulls the senses and even partially paralyzes unlucky bugs, making it easier for a fatal slip and tumble into the trap below. If that wasn’t extreme enough, pitcher plants are also fire-dependent, relying on the cleansing force of natural lightning-strike wildfires to keep the longleaf pine understory open and sunny.

Besides the charismatic Sarracenia, Alabama is also home to four species of Drosera, the sundews, which entice unfortunate insects to a sticky end with leaves covered in glistening drops of sparkling dew. Once the unfortunate bug is stuck, the leaves curl around it, globbing more inescapable goo onto the bug and using that same sticky substance to break down the soft parts of the insect and digest it alive. It’s incredible and a little scary to think that something so beautiful could be so deadly!

Another genus of plants which employ sticky traps are the Pinguicula, or butterworts, so-called for the greasy mucilage that coats their otherwise inviting leaves. These small plants hug the ground in quaint rosettes, sending up charming yellow, bluish, or pink flowers and seeming altogether very well-behaved. If you’re a small insect however, those shimmering sunny leaves can spell doom: like the sundews, their sparkling leaves appear to be covered in nectar, but once the bug is stuck, they pool with so much digestive fluid that the edges curl up to contain it all.

Another genus of native Alabaman carnivorous plants, the Utricularia, or bladderworts, have an even more specialized trap. Often found floating listlessly in stagnant, swampy pools and looking like nothing so much as strands of green algae, bladderworts actually possess the fastest moving parts in the entire plant kingdom. Their finely-tuned suction traps, shaped like a balloon or pouch and sporting a trapdoor kept on a hair trigger under extreme pressure, can deploy within 5.2 milliseconds. That’s twenty-eight times faster than a human can blink, meaning that any hapless aquatic prey, like mosquito larvae, that happen to brush up against the trigger hairs are instantly trapped inside. The door to the trap swings shut and the plant begins pumping water out of the trap and filling it with digestive fluid. Utricularia are tiny, nearly invisible killers. You might only notice them if you stop to admire their colorful orchid-like flowers, swaying delicately in the breeze over still water.

It’s bizarre to think that somewhere like Alabama might harbor a whole host of plants that can be simultaneously so lovely and so dangerous (if you’re a bug – luckily, none of our native carnivorous plants are dangerous to humans!). These mysterious and marvelous plants used to make up a significant portion of our landscape. Much of what is now sod, cotton, corn, or housing developments used to be endless stretches of wild beauty: fields of white-topped pitcher plants, sprinkled with sundews, native orchids, blazing star, and countless other breathtaking native plants. Some refuges of our irreplaceable natural heritage remain, but please visit them with respect and care. Without our protection, our own native Alabaman carnivorous plants, known from nowhere else in the entire world, will disappear forever.

Hello, everyone! I hope that you are enjoying your summer break now that school is out. Here at Bellingrath, we’re happy to have our second year of the Gulf Coast Chinese Lantern Festival finished. Phew! It’s been a good run, but as I’m sure so many of you also feel, the days and weeks and months just seem to pass ever faster and faster, eh?

So, you ask, how did we do this year? Was the event successful? Are we going to do it again in 2027? To these questions, I can say “pretty good” and “yes” and yes!” Our attendance numbers for 2026, compared with the inaugural 2025 year, were down, but we feel that economic and cost-of-living issues are pinching people’s wallets and budget – and we at BGH understand this, too. Despite, however, us having fewer attendees, the reviews (both online and on-site) were nothing short of amazing and praiseworthy for this year’s show. Our partner, Tianyu Arts & Culture, put together an entirely new show for this year, and to my great excitement, they created several signature set pieces based on concepts that I had given them back in 2025 (for which there wasn’t enough time to realize). Thus, we had flowering dogwoods, pitcher plants (complete with bats bobbing in and out of the pitchers, lol), native azaleas, and also our familiar Formosan azaleas. These set pieces were crafted specifically for the Bellingrath show, and we couldn’t be more pleased! We hope you noticed these “local flora” nods when you visited.

Although our attentions are now starting to turn to this year’s Magic Christmas in Lights, we will soon (by late summer) be working on next year’s Gulf Coast Chinese Lantern Festival, believe it or not. If you have any thoughts on specific new set pieces that you would like to see next year, please send us your ideas. You never know what we’ll decide to adopt!

The reasoning behind us hosting a second light show at BGH – with Magic Christmas being the first one, of course – were two-fold: to provide more opportunities for you, our visitors and supporters, to experience our Charmed Spot of the Deep South at a different time of the year, and also to provide crucial operating support that allows us to fulfill our mission and keep the doors open. Public gardens are resource intensive organizations to operate, and given today’s visitor expectations, we know that we can never rest on our laurels “waiting” on you all to just show up. As staff will affirm, I often say that we always need to give visitors at least two reasons to come to BGH. Although I feel that the gardens and home are reason enough, I also know from my career experiences and from my colleagues’ perspectives that our own splendid campus isn’t enough. We need to give you another reason to come – something so compelling that you just can’t wait to see what we have offer. Both Magic Christmas in Lights and the Gulf Coast Chinese Lantern Festival offer this “second reason” level of attractiveness and attention.

In our view, Bellingrath remains as vital today as it was in Mr. Bellingrath’s time, for the societal and spiritual benefits that it brings forth. Public gardens and historic estates aren’t just “pretty places,” ya’ll. They are essential components of the social fabric and regional identity of the communities in which they are located. Although we can never rest fully on past successes, we can celebrate them while also looking forward to the next set of reasons that we are giving you to continue supporting us. Thank you for all you do for Bellingrath Gardens & Home. We cannot exist without you!

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Hot off the heels of talking about two projects in my e-newsletter column last month, I now want to update you on a plethora of other projects that have been ongoing at Bellingrath Gardens & Home.  Honestly y’all, it sometimes takes a scorecard for me to keep up with everything! Although it’s not quite the ten frames from a bowling scorecard, we think you’ll be impressed.

Project 1 – Permanent Lighting for the Overflow Parking Lot – As part of our “Laying the Groundwork for the Centennial Master Plan” fundraising campaign, Cory Sparks and I worked hard to secure $235,000, and counting, in funding for this year alone! One of the first projects let from this initiative was for McCollum Electric (Mobile, AL) to install buried electrical conductors running to, and then among, six light poles installed at the perimeter of the overflow parking lot (adjacent to the Greenhouse Complex), and then to affix new LED light fixtures purchased last year to these poles. This work will eliminate BGH’s need to rent diesel-powered portable light towers during seasonal events such as Magic Christmas in Lights. I am happy to report that this project is almost complete, as of this May 31 writing. We thank the Crampton Trust for a major $75,000 gift recently given to the “Laying the Groundwork” campaign and also our other funders: The J.L. Bedsole Foundation, A.S. Mitchell Foundation, Dr. Monte L. Moorer Foundation, Laidlaw Foundation, and Julien E. Marx Foundation.

Project 2 – Revitalized Arbors – Visitors regularly enjoy walking around Mirror Lake at BGH, and we often see them appreciating the swings on the North Arbor and West Arbor, and also the ones on the Brick Patio. As with wooden members that we had to replace on the Bayou Boardwalk last year, these Arbors also required significant repairs. BGH’s own Maintenance Department, superbly led by Harold Fischer, has addressed these concerns and topped them off with nice paint jobs using our Urbane Bronze color as a finish. Thanks, Harold, Mitchell, Dubby, and Becca!

Project 3 – Archaeological Dig Redux (Round 2026) – Way back in 2000, the University of South Alabama’s Center for Archaeological Studies, then led by Dr. Gregory Waselkov, conducted several digs at BGH to identify and locate the 1760s era “Lisloy Plantation” site. That work resulted in significant finds of artifacts, but, alas, no follow-up studies were done.  We decided to re-engage the Center, now under Dr. Philip Carr’s leadership, and in May hosted USA Archaeology students for follow-up digs in several areas. More artifacts were found, and a report will be generated in the coming months. We are so thrilled and honored to have a continuation of this important research on the BGH campus.  We thank the Alabama Humanities Alliance for providing funding in support of this project, too. Stay tuned for more when Professor Carr presents a preliminary report on Monday, June 22nd, at 10 a.m. in the Magnolia Room.

Project 4 – Headhouse Insulation Progress – Over the past winter and early spring months, we crowd-funded a $25,000 project to replace the insulation at BGH’s Headhouse building (the metal-frame, mid-1980s structure that serves as the working space for our Greenhouse staff). Thanks to you – and with no small amount of “enticement” from our irresistible “greenhouse sales kitty,” Kiwi, we were able to reach this goal! Energy Control Insulation (Theodore, AL) recently completed the first phase of this project – the removal and disposal of the old insulation. We are now working in an interim period with E. Cornell Malone Corp. (Mobile, AL) on some follow-up needs on the roof seal work they performed last year as well as sealing work needed on the exterior walls. We feel that by mid-summer, we will have the new insulation installed by Energy Control Insulation, bringing this much-needed building improvements project to a close!

Project 5 – New Greenhouse Fans – Thanks to the successful award of a $21,000, nationally-competitive grant from a California-based charitable foundation, BGH has been able to embark on a “critical-need” project – the replacement of all of the exhaust and circulating fans for all of our greenhouses. This $21,000 grant, awarded in December, allowed us to purchase enough exhaust fans to completely modernize our two largest greenhouses with industrial-grade, top-line fans and to install premium-quality circulating fans in all of the greenhouses. Although many more exhaust fans need to be replaced, we can now say that we have achieved serious momentum on this crucial need of maximizing functionality of our aging and deteriorated Greenhouse Complex facilities.

Project 6 – Electrical Infrastructure Engineering – Bellingrath’s electrical infrastructure is old.  Four years ago, we celebrated the reconstruction of new, buried power mains leading to our property, a major leap forward for us. Until this year’s success with our “Laying the Groundwork for the Centennial Master Plan” capital campaign, however, we did not have the budgetary means to address the electrical infrastructure that we own – the lines, panels, subpanels, etc. from the Alabama Power transformers “inward” onto the BGH campus. Thanks both to the technical expertise of Hargrove Engineers and Constructors and their generous support as Business Circle members, however, we can now say that we are literally days away from having a brand new, site-wide electrical engineering plan for Bellingrath Gardens & Home! You will be hearing LOTS about this plan in the coming months, as we soon shift gears to rebuild our electrical infrastructure, replacing outdated, inadequate infrastructure while also expanding our grid to accommodate our continuing growth and future development per the Centennial Master Plan. The days of cables hanging from trees and breaker panels fastened to our live oaks will soon be over, and we cannot be more thankful. Harold Fischer, BGH’s Maintenance Manager, and I have worked hand-in-hand with Hargrove’s Brian Penn, P.E. and Jake Lake, P.E. to produce a new vision for electrical infrastructure at Bellingrath Gardens & Home.

Project 7 – Summer House Painting – With the recent installation of the copper louvers on the new cupola on the Summer House, the only task remaining to officially close out this project is to get all of the painting work completed, a complex and not insignificant task, I might add. Fortunately, our Maintenance Department is hard at work on this, and over the next several weeks, you will see a renewed focus on this project now that other priority projects have been completed. We think you’ll also like the new color scheme that has been developed for the restoration of this historic structure.  (Anyone up for some Haint Blue ceilings?!) From primer coats to paint with carpenter bee deterrents added in, we are taking this project very seriously so that this restoration lasts for another 50 years! Come and watch final bits of the project be completed over the next several weeks. (This project, as you may recall, was funded through several significant grants from local foundations, plus a crowd-funding campaign, and even a special bequest from a former Board Chair’s estate. We are planning a fall ribbon-cutting ceremony, which will be announced soon!)

Project 8 – Magnolia Room New Doors – Last but not least is a project that has also progressed since last year – the Phase 1 Renovation of the Magnolia Room. The final aspect of the project was to add in a set of custom doors – the fabrication of which became yet another test of patience on BGH’s part. With the doors now installed and hardware affixed, the only tasks remaining include painting and then installation of the closing and latching mechanisms. Due to the time required for fabrication and the above subsequent tasks, it’s probably a nice thing that Olivia Garrett, BGH’s crackerjack Marketing and PR Manager, decided to place our “step and repeat” banner in front of the unfinished doors back in January! To our pleasant surprise, the banner almost instantaneously transformed the “doors” into one of BGH’s most popular selfie stations, LOL. In the coming weeks, you’ll see painting commence and the remaining hardware installs completed, such that we will at last have finished up Phase 1 of the Magnolia Room. What about Phase 2, you ask?! Well, to that, we’ll have to ask you to stay tuned for more good things and more future projects to come.

And so, with all of these words, you now know about eight projects. That these eight projects represent only a portion of everything that is happening at BGH means that not only are there future tales to tell, but also that we have tremendously exciting things continuing to occur at Bellingrath. For this all to happen, we can only thank you, our members, supporters, and patrons. Thanks to you, we are enjoying historic investments in Bellingrath Gardens & Home, investments that will pay dividends in the years to come as we approach and then cross over into our second century as the Gulf Coast’s leading historic public garden.

Todd

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