Ten scarecrows are standing in the Sandhills Horticultural Gardens right now, propped along the paths that wind past the Japanese garden and the wetland boardwalk. Garden clubs built some of them. Sandhills Community College students and staff built the rest. Each one has a name, a theme, and a QR code so visitors can vote for a favorite as they walk the 32 acres off Airport Road in Pinehurst. The Scarecrow Stroll is on display through October 31, free to enter, open dawn to dusk, the way the gardens have operated since the Ebersole Holly Garden opened here in 1978.
It is a small, homemade kind of event. Charming, seasonal, easy to miss if you are not already the type to walk a garden in the fall. And it is happening at the exact moment the same institution is preparing to do something it has never attempted in its 48-year history.
Ten Scarecrows, QR Code Voting
The Scarecrow Stroll is the kind of event that explains itself. Garden clubs and college volunteers build the scarecrows from whatever they have on hand. Visitors wander the collection at their own pace, vote for a favorite, and go home. There is no admission fee because there rarely is one here. The gardens have always run on that logic: free to enter, funded by a nonprofit membership society, staffed partly by students in Sandhills Community College's landscape gardening program who use the grounds as a working classroom.
That model has produced a genuinely varied property. Since 1978, the gardens have added the Sir Walter Raleigh Garden, the Atkins Hillside Garden, the Hoad Children's Garden, a Conifer Garden, a Fruit and Vegetable Garden, a Succulent Garden, Hackley Woodland Garden, Ambrose Japanese Garden, and the Desmond Native Wetland Trail Garden, all inside the same 32 acres. It is a lot of variety for a property that has never charged for entry and has never needed a marketing budget to fill it.
The Scarecrow Stroll fits neatly into that history. It costs nothing to stage beyond the volunteer hours. It draws the people who already know the gardens exist. It is the kind of event a community college garden runs every October because it always has.
A Different Kind of Announcement
In June, the college and the region's tourism authority announced something that does not fit that pattern at all. Sandhills Community College and Visit Pinehurst, Southern Pines, Aberdeen confirmed plans for the Sandhills Garden of Lights, a holiday display set to run on select nights from November 27, 2026, through January 10, 2027. The display will feature more than one million lights across roughly half of the garden's acreage, built out with holiday scenes, static installations, and interactive elements for visitors of all ages.
The gardens are calling it the inaugural Sandhills Garden of Lights, and the language matters. This is not an expansion of something the property already does each winter. It is a new category of event, built at a scale the gardens have not attempted before, and produced by an outside company rather than volunteers and student labor.
That company is Mosca Design, based in Youngsville, North Carolina, a firm with more than four decades in commercial holiday lighting. Its other work in the region includes displays at the Greensboro Science Center and the Cape Fear Botanical Garden in Fayetteville. Bringing in a producer with that track record is itself a signal. The Scarecrow Stroll runs on volunteer time. A million-light display spanning half a 32-acre property does not.
As reported by The Sanford Herald, "We are thrilled to team with Visit Pinehurst, Southern Pines, Aberdeen on this spectacular holiday light show in our horticultural gardens," said Sandhills Community College President Alexander "Sandy" Stewart. "We are a college for the community, and nothing brings community togetherness like the holidays."
The report also quoted Visit Pinehurst, Southern Pines, Aberdeen President and CEO Phil Werz, who framed the partnership in similar terms, describing the goal as giving the area's holiday season, already known for what he called a Hallmark postcard aura, something bigger to offer both visitors and the people who already live here.
What a Production Company Brings to the Gardens
The two events sitting side by side this fall make the shift easy to see in plain terms.
| Scarecrow Stroll | Sandhills Garden of Lights | |
|---|---|---|
| Built by | Garden clubs, SCC students and staff | Mosca Design, a commercial lighting producer |
| Scale | 10 scarecrows along existing paths | 1 million-plus lights across about half the garden's acreage |
| Cost to visitors | Free | Admission and ticketing details not yet released |
| Run dates | Through October 31, 2026 | Select nights, November 27, 2026, through January 10, 2027 |
| Backers | Garden volunteers | Sandhills Community College and Visit Pinehurst, Southern Pines, Aberdeen |
A volunteer-built scarecrow contest and a professionally produced light show covering half a garden are not different sizes of the same thing. They are different kinds of investment entirely. One is maintained by people who already love the property. The other required a college to partner with the region's official tourism authority and hire an outside firm with a multi-state client list. That is the kind of decision an institution makes when it wants a property to reach people who do not already know it exists.
For a garden that has operated for nearly five decades on free admission and volunteer labor, that is worth sitting with. The Sandhills Garden of Lights is being built to draw visitors from across the region, in Werz's words, from all of North Carolina and beyond. Whatever it becomes, the version of the gardens that shows up in late November will not be the version that has quietly hosted a scarecrow contest every October.
What's Still Unconfirmed
The college has been direct about what it does not yet know. As of this writing, admission pricing, advance ticket sales, group sales, exact nightly schedules, and parking arrangements have not been finalized. The gardens' own announcement states plainly that those details will be released as they become available, which means anyone planning to attend should expect updates through the fall rather than a full schedule today.
That gap is worth watching rather than guessing at. A display built around a million lights and produced by a company with Greensboro Science Center and Cape Fear Botanical Garden credits on its résumé is not likely to run on a casual walk-up basis the way the Scarecrow Stroll does. Timed entry, ticket tiers, and specific nights are common at comparable displays elsewhere, though nothing about pricing or format has been confirmed here yet.
What is confirmed is the window: select nights between November 27 and January 10. For residents used to treating the gardens as a free, dawn-to-dusk stop whenever the mood strikes, that is a real change in how the property will operate for about six weeks this winter.
The Same Gardens, Doing a New Job
None of this changes what the Sandhills Horticultural Gardens have been for most of the year. The Ball Garden Visitors Center still opens at 8 a.m. The wetland trail, the children's garden, and the succulent beds are not going anywhere. The Scarecrow Stroll will end on October 31 the way it always has, decided by a QR code vote and taken down by volunteers.
But a garden that has spent 48 years building variety through small, low-cost additions is now, for one stretch of one winter, being treated as something closer to regional infrastructure. Whether the Garden of Lights becomes an annual fixture or a one-time experiment will likely become clearer once ticketing and attendance numbers are public. For now, the clearest fact is the contrast sitting in the gardens this fall: ten homemade scarecrows finishing out October, and a production company from Youngsville quietly wiring half the property for a display it has never hosted before.
If you're the kind of person who already has the Scarecrow Stroll on your calendar every fall, keep an eye on the gardens' own announcements for Garden of Lights ticketing details as they come out. And if you're curious about what a season like this says about where Pinehurst is headed as a place to spend a life, not just a weekend, that's a conversation Cherry Amanatidis is always glad to have.
