Landscaping in Dunwoody

Dunwoody was incorporated as a city on December 1, 2008 and had a population of 51,683 at the 2020 census. Much of the residential fabric is subdivision development on rolling wooded ground, and the landscape questions that come with that are consistent: lots that fall away behind the house, storm runoff collecting where the grade flattens, and lawns that were planted when the trees were half their present size.

The soil is the same Cecil-type profile that runs under the whole Georgia Piedmont, a sandy loam surface over red clay subsoil, kaolinitic and rated low for shrink-swell. It does not swell and it does not heave. It refuses water at rate, absorbing on the order of half an inch an hour by the Metro North Georgia Water Planning District figure, which is well short of what an Atlanta summer storm delivers. Everything past that becomes surface flow, and on a graded subdivision lot surface flow finds the low corner.

Watering is the same question here as anywhere else in Georgia. The Water Stewardship Act limits outdoor landscape irrigation to the hours between 4 p.m. and 10 a.m. across the state, with an exemption for new plants, seed and turf during installation and for 30 days after it, and with drip irrigation, soaker hoses and hand watering carrying no time limit at all. That schedule is what a new planting has to be established inside, and it is the reason an establishment watering plan belongs in writing rather than in someone's memory.

Dunwoody also falls inside the Metro North Georgia Water Planning District, which covers fifteen counties including DeKalb and Fulton, so the district water-efficiency requirements for new landscape irrigation systems connected to a public supply apply on both sides of the county line. Rain sensor shut-offs, pressure regulation and subsurface methods in narrow strips are the practical consequences.