On a Saturday morning in mid-September, a line of cars will turn off Scott Boulevard in Decatur and thread into a parking lot that, on most days, serves a quiet seven-acre woodland. The occasion is Woodlands Garden's Fall Plant Sale, a two-day affair running September 19 and 20, 2026, that has quietly become one of the more unusual plant-buying opportunities in metro Atlanta. Shoppers can reserve a time slot online beginning at 9 a.m. each day, but the garden is also holding open walk-up hours from noon to 2 p.m., a nod to the fact that not everyone plans their weekends around a nursery run.
What sets the sale apart is not its size but its inventory. The selection leans heavily native, with an emphasis on plants of the upper Georgia Piedmont — the ecological province that includes Decatur and the rolling country around it. Organizers describe it as the most diverse collection of Piedmont natives assembled anywhere in the area, and they mean it literally: the sale includes species that are difficult or impossible to find in the conventional nursery trade. Alongside pollinator-attracting perennials, shoppers will find shrubs, groundcovers, and trees, some grown on site at the garden and others sourced from specialist native-plant nurseries. Plant-expert volunteers staff the tables, sorting the offerings into departments and answering questions — the kind of guidance that matters when a buyer is staring at a flat of something they have never seen for sale before.
The sale is free to attend, and so is the garden itself, which is open daily from dawn to dusk at no charge. That openness is the point of the place, and it is the product of a decision made more than two decades ago by a couple who could easily have done otherwise.
The story begins in 1946, when Dr. Chester Morse, a Massachusetts native, and his wife, Eugenia Slack Morse of Decatur, moved onto a wooded tract that would become their lifelong project. Scott Boulevard was then a dirt road, and the property — an old farm site — was, in the garden's own telling, a honeysuckle jungle. Chet and Gene cleared and planted, adding to their original small parcel until they had assembled the seven-acre tract that is now Woodlands Garden. They gardened there for more than sixty years, filling the grounds around their house with the plants that caught their interest: classic Southern spring shrubs like azaleas, rhododendrons, and hydrangeas; more than a hundred camellias that bloom from November into March; Japanese maples that carry the garden through every season.
The land might have gone the way of much of Decatur's postwar acreage. Instead, in 2002, the Morses arranged to have their home and its surrounding seven acres permanently preserved from development, so that future generations could experience the wooded estate. They understood what was coming: Decatur was urbanizing fast, with projections at the time pointing to roughly 29 percent growth over two decades, and the couple turned down large offers from developers to keep the property intact. Since then, the family and the surrounding community have built a collaboration around that decision. Woodlands Garden is now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with its own board, staff, and volunteers, operating under a mission to preserve a woodland garden as an urban sanctuary for educating and engaging the community in the natural world.
The Morses' original home now serves as the visitor center and offices. A second, larger house — built as the family grew to four children and thirteen grandchildren — was deconstructed in 2012, in keeping with the owners' wishes and the property's master plan. That clearing is being remade as sunny pollinator habitat, with bird baths, sitting areas, and a small shelter. The garden's horticultural identity has likewise been formalized. In 2006, Woodlands adopted a plan for a demonstration garden, described as unique in the Southeast, to showcase the native plants of the upper Georgia Piedmont. In that Georgia Piedmont Native Garden, volunteer gardeners work continuously to remove invasives — ivy, honeysuckle, privet, liriope — while installing natives such as pawpaw, spicebush, and sweetspire, and flowering perennials including black cohosh, blue star, and white wood aster.
There is a story embedded in the trees themselves. When developers began building apartments in the woods behind the Morse house, the family rescued a large stand of native azaleas and brought them onto the property, where they still bloom in yellow, pink, white, and orange each spring. Native ironwood, tulip tree, white oak, and red maple thrived, while bloodroot, trillium, partridgeberry, and ginger carpeted the ground beneath them. The garden also keeps a separate Morse Family Heritage Garden around the former house site, where the couple's own plantings — astilbes, hostas, hellebores, ferns — still grow.
For all that history, the plant sale is a relatively practical institution, and its logic is straightforward. The plants sold are ones proven to thrive in the Decatur area, and the money raised supports the nonprofit's work preserving the greenspace. Buyers are not just acquiring a shrub; they are, in a small way, extending the garden's native-planting project into their own yards. The garden's volunteer corps is central to the operation — the same people who spend their weekends pulling privet and planting spicebush are the ones who will be standing behind the tables in September, telling a first-time native gardener which groundcover will tolerate a dry slope and which shrub will feed the pollinators.
That combination — a genuinely hard-to-find plant selection, free admission, expert volunteers, and a walk-up window for the unplanned — is what makes the Fall Plant Sale worth a Saturday. It runs September 19 and 20, 2026, at Woodlands Garden, 932 Scott Blvd. in Decatur. Parking is limited, and the garden encourages visitors to carpool, bike, or walk. Time slots can be reserved in advance; walk-ups are welcome from noon to 2 p.m. both days.