Images: Block leveled for bigger Atlanta Botanical Garden

As any passerby can see, the Atlanta Botanical Garden’s long-planned march to the Beltline is full speed ahead right now. 

The Garden, a Midtown landmark for generations, has begun demolition work in noticeable ways between Piedmont Avenue and a section of the Beltline’s Northeast Trail opened in late 2023. The work is part of the first Garden expansion in its 50-year history, as of this year, that will make the attraction 25 percent larger. 

Big picture, the nearly 8-acre expansion that initially came to light three and ½ years ago will aim to make the Garden Atlanta’s “first major arts and cultural institution directly accessible from the Beltline,” as project leaders recently put it. 

The first step is to remove a strip of retail buildings and a large facility for public storage the Garden has spent years acquiring.  

Designs call for bringing the Garden’s current 30-acre offerings northward, via a series of terraces and “rooms,” and linking with completed sections of the Northeast Trail that branch toward Buckhead (to the north) and Piedmont Park (directly south). 

Specific components will include a programmable Beltline Plaza outside the Garden gates, designed for a “variety of free, mission-oriented programs and community engagement opportunities for people of all ages,” per the latest project description. 

Also facing the Beltline, a new visitor center will feature bicycle parking, a bike shop, an indoor-outdoor café, and other amenities. 

Once inside the Garden’s gates, the expansion will include “a series of immersive experiences… organized along a central Grand Axis, providing a strong linear sightline through the center of the expansion site, with dramatic views between garden rooms,” per the description. 

Other features will include an “enchanting Walled Garden” and a “dramatic Fountain Garden on the property’s highest point,” per officials. 

On the opposite side of the entrance, positioned up the hill, a jewel-box orangerie, or a greenhouse for growing oranges, is also planned to bookend the experience.

Hoerr Schaudt, a Chicago-based landscape architecture firm, was hired by the Garden in 2022 to lead designs of the expansion, alongside other firms that include Atlanta-based Smith Dalia Architects.

Initial timelines had called for the expanded gardens to be unveiled in time for Atlanta’s FIFA World Cup matches—and the Garden’s 50th anniversary—in 2026. That was contingent, however, on storage facility company Public Storage vacating their building on the expansion site and relocating to a new facility on the flipside of Piedmont Park along Monroe Drive.

That five-story Public Storage facility finished construction last fall at the doorstep of the Beltline’s Eastside/Northeast trails and Piedmont Park. The move was key to a complex, controversial land swap between the Garden and Public Storage.

During planning stages, Beltline Design Review Committee members criticized the Public Storage project’s lack of retail space or residential uses such as townhomes as “a missed opportunity” and “a use that does not belong on the Beltline or anywhere near it.” But the project moved forward nonetheless. 

Now, Garden officials plan to officially break ground on the expansion by late summer, once the former Public Storage facility and other properties along Piedmont Avenue are cleared away. 

The current, revised goal is to finish construction and open the expanded attraction by late 2028 or early 2029, as Garden officials recently told Urbanize Atlanta. 

The Garden has entered the final stages of a $160-million capital campaign to fund the growth spurt. 

That tally includes a lead gift of $25 million from the James M. Cox Foundation, along with other gifts from Garden trustee Carol Tomé and her husband Ramon Tomé ($10 million) and the UPS Foundation ($5 million), alongside a $40 million grant from the Lettie Pate Evans Foundation.

In the gallery above, find more context and the latest glimpses of what’s to come at Midtown’s most celebrated Garden. 

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