Usually, there are no dogwoods in the Lenox Square parking lot.

Lots of asphalt, yes. Dogwoods, no.

JOHNNY CRAWFORD/AJC (ENLARGE)
Randy Hodges, of Spring City, Tenn., sets up his booth on Lenox Square's lot, the site of this year's fest because of the drought.
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EVENT Atlanta Dogwood Festival Noon-9 p.m. Friday; 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Saturday; noon-6 p.m. Sunday. Free. Lenox Square parking lot, 3393 Peachtree Road N.E., Atlanta. 404-817-6642, www.dogwood.org RELATED LINKS: • STORY: Spring festivals • CALENDAR: More spring events

But on Wednesday, a modern-day Birnam Wood began arriving to fill one corner of Lenox's multiple acres of blacktop, heralding one of Atlanta's oldest springtime traditions, the Dogwood Festival.

None of the 2,500 dogwood saplings imported for the event was more than 2 feet tall, but they held a promise of the white blossoms that give the city, and the festival, its Milky Way appearance every April.

The festival's longtime home has been Piedmont Park. Organizers sought new surroundings this year, after being evicted from the drought-stressed park by conservators worried about additional damage to the turf and trees.

On sale at $5 a pop, the dogwood saplings are intended as a fund-raiser for an equally drought-stressed festival, which was forced to regroup and find a new home with little advance warning. Each adoptee will come with care and feeding instructions.

"Georgia Forestry Service personnel will be on site to tell people how to care for them and plant them," said Brian Hill, executive director of the festival.

Unlikely, not unlovely

A mall parking lot may seem like an unlikely locale for a spring festival, but the Dogwood's organizers are looking on the bright side.

"People who haven't been to Lenox in a while have a wrong impression when they think of a parking lot," said Hill. "It's actually a well-landscaped parking lot, with trees, shrubbery and seasonal color beds. We're working with a landscape company to bring in some landscape plants and some neat surprises."

Latter-day Atlantans might be surprised to learn that in a previous incarnation the 74 acres that became Lenox were a heavily landscaped country estate. Owned by Atlanta banker and sportsman John Ottley, the property featured riding trails and a 12-room mansion he called "Joyeuse."

Noted Atlanta landscape architect Ed Daugherty, who was practicing at the time, remembers the estate having a "meadowlike lawn, framed on the sides and back with hardwood forest, everything that grows here — pines, oaks, maples, hickories, whatever."

In 1959, Ottley's property was transformed into the city's first and biggest suburban mall. Photos from the era show the original Lenox as an unrelieved wasteland of concrete surrounding a collection of boxy stores, separated by an outdoor mall.

Developers made the unwise choice of planting pin oaks in small areas scattered around the parking lot, Daugherty remembers. "The lower limbs drooped like a hoop skirt," he said, and scraped the tops of the cars passing underneath. "They ended up limbing them back so they looked like hat racks."

'Vegetable soup' horticulture

With the Dogwood Festival headed there, Daugherty recently returned to the Lenox parking area to take inventory of the green life on hand.

He found Spanish bayonet and sweet bay, crape myrtle and river birch, Deodar cedar and Burford holly and a hardy line of full-grown willow oaks, clinging for dear life to a slope of rock-hard, bone-dry Georgia clay along Peachtree Road. But not a dogwood in sight.

He was surprised at the profusion of plant life — and at the jumbled planting scheme that puts a swamp-loving magnolia immediately next to a desert-loving juniper.

"It's a vegetable soup horticulture and a version of what's going on inside on the shelves of all these stores," said Daugherty, fingering the leaves of a dwarf Burford hedge that lines the guardrail along Lenox Road.

The mall has applied for the right to cut down several of the willow oaks that block the view of the Lenox Mall sign on Peachtree, but was rebuffed by the Atlanta Tree Conservation Committee. Other willow oaks along Peachtree are still in jeopardy.

Daugherty, who is also a board member of conservation group Trees Atlanta, said the willow oaks are among the gems of the Lenox landscaping.

"They are the only thing in scale with the great open space here, and it would be a shame to let them go."