Fayette County, GA Landscaping Rules: Native Plants (2026)

Chapter 104, article V requires every nonresidential development and every nonresidential use inside a residential zoning district to submit a landscape plan to the environmental management department before grading begins, covering street-frontage, parking-lot, side-yard, and zoning-buffer landscape areas. Section 104-112 defines native plants simply as plants indigenous or naturalized to a given area, and section 104-116(a), titled Suggested planting materials, opens with a native-plants list broken into categories including trees from one to eight feet, running through species such as red bud, dogwood, red maple, sugar maple, southern magnolia, bald cypress, tulip poplar, willow oak, river birch and American beech.

The list continues with small shrubs, ground covers such as native ferns, and vines including Carolina yellow jessamine, giving a landscape architect a county-endorsed palette to draw from when preparing the plan required under section 104-114. Nothing in article V forces a developer to use only species off this list, but it does require any plan to be prepared by a licensed landscape architect or similarly licensed design professional, reviewed within 14 calendar days by the environmental management department, and finalized before a certificate of occupancy is issued.

Trees have to carry a minimum 2½-inch caliper at planting, and zoning buffer areas separately call for staggered double rows of evergreen material, a category that overlaps with, but is not limited to, the native species list in section 104-116.