Thirty acres of contiguous forest is a rarity anywhere inside the Perimeter. In Buckhead, where mature woodland is routinely carved into palatial estates, it is close to unheard of. So when the City of Atlanta closed on the historic Lucinda Bunnen estate at 3910 Randall Mill Road on June 30, it did more than add a line to the parks inventory — it preserved one of the last great unbroken woodlands in the neighborhood, and, if the city’s plans hold, it will leave that woodland largely as Bunnen kept it: quiet, wooded, and deliberately undeveloped.
This will not be a park in the way Buckhead thinks of parks. There will be no ball fields, no playground, no programming. “It was bought with Tree Trust Fund money,” said Mary Norwood, the Atlanta City Council member who represents District 8, “and you cannot take out trees when you use Tree Trust Fund, so it was very deliberate that this is not going to be something that we all of a sudden come up with these different activities.”
Who was Lucinda Bunnen?
Bunnen, who died in 2022 at 92, was proof that an artistic life keeps no schedule. She came to Atlanta in 1952, the year she married Robert Bunnen, and didn’t take up photography in earnest until her 40s. It was on a 1970 family trip that she discovered her talent behind the camera.
With less than a year of experience, she was invited to participate in the Georgia Artists Show at the High Museum of Art. In 1973, she co-founded Nexus, a photography cooperative that grew into Atlanta Contemporary. She gave the High more than 650 photographs — the Bunnen Collection — before funding a gallery at the museum dedicated to the art form she championed.
Which makes the fate of her land fitting. Bunnen assembled the property piece by piece, in part so her dogs could roam. The city now intends to keep it much the way she left it.
The Sale of the Estate
The path to public ownership ran through The Conservation Fund, the Arlington, Virginia-based nonprofit that purchased the estate for $13.5 million in October 2024 with the intention of holding the land until the city could buy it. According to Fulton County deed records, that handoff came on June 30, when the estate sold to the city for $7.8 million.
Norwood said the purchase drew on the city’s Tree Trust Fund. Every tree legally removed in Atlanta carries a fee: under the city’s Tree Protection Ordinance, property owners who take down a healthy tree and can’t fully replant on-site pay “recompense” into the fund. The Tree Trust Fund, overseen by the citizen-led Tree Conservation Commission, pays for planting and maintaining trees on public property, purchasing forested land for permanent conservation, and education programs. Because the money comes from that fund, the trees on the Bunnen land are, in effect, legally protected from the outset — the funding source and the conservation outcome are the same.
Plans for the Preserve
If Atlanta wants to know what the Bunnen preserve will become, Norwood says, it needs only look to the other side of town.
On Atlanta’s southwest side sits Cascade Springs Nature Preserve, a wooded tract the city has managed as protected greenspace for decades. It is not a recreation park. Its appeal is its restraint: walking trails through hardwood forest, natural springs, and a secured perimeter that keeps the land intact rather than programmed. It is, in short, the model — and Norwood says she pointed the parks department to it directly.
“What will be done first by the city is to secure it, secure the perimeter, which is exactly what the city has done with a very large nature preserve in Southside,” Norwood said, referring to Cascade Springs. She told the parks department, she said, to “replicate exactly what the city does with these large tracts, which is to have restricted ways in and out — not charging a fee or anything, but restricted in and out.”
The Bunnen land already has the bones for it. “There are already trails on the property because Mrs. Bunnen loved to have her dogs walk off leash, and so she had them on her own private acreage where they were certainly able to do that,” Norwood said. Nancy Creek runs through the property, and Norwood, who toured the land with the Bunnen family, describes it as serene.
The first visible change will be a fence — though Norwood is quick to say it won’t feel like one. “The perimeter fencing does not need to be frightening,” she said. “It just needs to be appropriate,” marking a clear way in and out for anyone on the property.
Beyond that, much remains undecided, and Norwood is candid about it. Asked about the fate of Bunnen’s house, she said plainly, “I do not know what the final is going to be.” One idea under discussion, she said, is a live-in steward — “someone who is a horticulturalist and a security person, an interesting combination, who can be there on the property.” Because Chastain Park sits so close, she added, that same caretaker might one day look after both: “The idea that someone would be on site at Bunnen taking care of Bunnen and be that close to Chastain would be lovely.” There is no public timeline for when the preserve will open, and no word yet on whether it will have its own conservancy the way Chastain does. “I don’t know that,” Norwood said.
What is clear is what the land means for a stretch of Buckhead squeezed by development.
“We’ve got two great parks and other parks in District 8, which are smaller neighborhood parks, so we have other places where there is activity,” Norwood said. “With Memorial to the south and Chastain to the north, what we did not have is anything in between — and a nature preserve to maintain, with so much pressure coming to our part of town for development.”
She returned, more than once, to the people who made it happen. “From the very beginning, community input was a key factor in the city deciding to make this investment,” she said, “and community members, neighbors, and others contributed time, energy, and funds.” She called it “a very generous decision on behalf of the city and the community members who gave time, effort, and funding for the project.”
For now, the gates will be secured, a fence will go up, and the woods Lucinda Bunnen spent a lifetime gathering will stay standing — walked, perhaps, by someone else’s dogs.
