If you saw the news this month about a new 30-acre nature preserve in Buckhead, there is a good chance you pictured the wrong forest. Buckhead already has one: Blue Heron Nature Preserve, tucked off Roswell Road with its three-mile Blueway Trail winding through wetlands and meadow along Nancy Creek. It has been open, free, and dawn-to-dusk for years.
The preserve that just made news is a different 30 acres entirely, a few miles away on Randall Mill Road, and as of this month it is still fenced off. The City of Atlanta closed on the land this summer, ending a two-year effort by a national conservation nonprofit to hold the property until the city could afford to buy it outright rather than let it be subdivided. But closing on land and opening it to walkers are two different milestones, and the gap between them is the actual story here for anyone who lives nearby and wants to know where they can put their boots on this fall.
The One You Can Already Walk
Blue Heron sits at 4055 Roswell Road in North Buckhead, and it runs itself less like a museum piece and more like an active community program. The preserve hosts a monthly Second Saturday Safari, a guided trail walk paired with a local expert. Past sessions have brought in Dr. Chris Mowry of the Atlanta Coyote Society and a Trees Atlanta forest walk, the kind of programming that gives a longtime resident a reason to come back rather than check the box once.
The preserve also made a quiet logistical shift this year. Its 2026 summer camp lineup ran directly out of the main preserve building after the City of Atlanta granted permission to stay on site, instead of shifting to Sarah Smith Elementary as in prior summers. It sounds like a small detail. For parents on Roswell Road who had built their drop-off routine around the old arrangement, it was not.
Blue Heron is also investing in its own visibility. With help from Park Pride, the preserve is building a new gateway entrance at Roswell Road, complete with signage and native meadow plantings, so that a preserve many residents still describe as underused becomes easier to find in the first place.
The One You Can't Walk Yet
The Randall Mill Road forest carries a different name and a very different immediate future: the Lucinda Bunnen Nature Preserve, once the city finishes the handoff process.
Lucinda Bunnen spent five decades assembling this land. She and her husband Bob commissioned architect Cecil Alexander, the same architect behind Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, to design a home on the property in 1956, drawing inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright. What started as five acres around that house grew, parcel by parcel, into roughly 30 contiguous acres of forest along Little Nancy Creek. Around 2000, Bunnen installed a two-mile trail so she could walk her dogs and photograph the land that shaped her career as the photographer known as the godmother of Southern photography, who helped build the High Museum of Art's photography collection. She died in 2022 at 92.
After her death, the property went up for sale, and the fear among neighbors was exactly what has happened to other large Buckhead lots for years.
"All the trees are cut down, and a McMansion is thrown up," neighborhood president Sally Riker said of what typically happens to large lots nearby.
The Conservation Fund, a national nonprofit that buys and holds land for future public parks, stepped in and purchased the property in late 2024 for roughly $13.5 million, then held it for two years while the city assembled its share of the funding. When the city finally closed the deal this summer, roughly half its contribution came from Atlanta's Tree Trust Fund, with private donations covering the rest.
Here is the practical difference for anyone deciding where to hike this month:
- Blue Heron: open now, free, dawn to dusk, three-mile marked trail, monthly guided programming
- Bunnen preserve: closed to the public, gated, city officials say trails could open as early as next year
Why Bunnen Will Stay Wild
The reason the Bunnen land is likely to stay closer to its current state, rather than becoming a second Blue Heron with camps and guided walks, comes down to where that Tree Trust Fund money originates. The fund is built from fees developers pay elsewhere in the city when they remove healthy trees and cannot replant on site, and it is earmarked for planting, maintaining, and buying forested land for permanent conservation. Land bought that way does not come with a mandate for ball fields or a rec center attached. City officials have pointed to Cascade Springs Nature Preserve on Atlanta's southwest side, a decades-old wooded tract managed with walking trails and a secured perimeter rather than recreational programming, as the rough model for how Bunnen will be run.
City Council member Mary Norwood, who represents the district, has said the forest will stay a forest and that trails could open to the public as early as next year. She has also floated a longer-range idea beyond a simple hike-and-leave preserve: artists in residence eventually taking up space on the property, a nod to Bunnen's own history as a fixture of Atlanta's arts community.
What Actually Changes For A Resident This Fall
For now, the practical answer for anyone who lives near either property is straightforward. Blue Heron is the one you can use today, and its guided walks and camp programming make it worth treating as a regular part of a weekend rotation rather than a one-time visit. The Bunnen preserve is the one to watch. City officials have said trails could open to the public as early as next year, which means the fence along Randall Mill Road is worth checking periodically rather than assuming nothing has changed since the closing.
The two properties sharing an acreage number and a "nature preserve" label is coincidence, not branding. But it means anyone searching for what is new in Buckhead greenspace this year needs to know which 30 acres they are actually asking about, since one is a place to spend a Saturday morning right now and the other is a promise that is still a year or more from delivering on it.
If you are watching how Buckhead's neighborhoods are changing, whether that is greenspace, new construction, or what a specific block is worth this year, David Huang Group tracks these shifts closely because they shape how the area lives day to day, not just what it costs to buy into it. Schedule a free market consultation if you want a local read on what any of this means for your corner of Buckhead.
