The Most Beautiful Arboretums in the World
3 places in 2 countries · updated 5 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful arboretums in the world are Sofiyivsky Park (Ukraine), Bodnant Garden (United Kingdom) and Westonbirt Arboretum (United Kingdom). The list covers 3 arboretums in 2 countries. The United Kingdom has the most, with 2. Last updated 5 October 2026.
An arboretum is a garden of trees, and the finest of them are slow masterpieces: planted by people who knew they would never see the result, then shaped over generations into landscapes where specimens from every temperate continent grow side by side. What raises one to world rank is the depth of the collection, the maturity of its trees and the way they are arranged — glades and rides opening onto colour, avenues leading the eye, water and rock giving the trees a stage.
This collection gathers three very different examples. Westonbirt, the National Arboretum in Gloucestershire, was begun by Robert Holford in the nineteenth century and is famous for its Japanese maples, which turn the glades red and gold in autumn. Bodnant Garden in north Wales climbs a valley above the River Conwy in terraces, with its celebrated laburnum arch and a wooded dell along a stream. Sofiyivka Park in Uman, Ukraine, was created at the end of the eighteenth century by Count Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki for his wife Sophia, and arranges ponds, waterfalls, grottoes and rocks into a romantic landscape drawn from classical myth.
These arboretums were chosen for how they look and placed in order of beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a point on the map, and the section also opens country by country on separate pages.
01 Sofiyivsky Park
Національний дендрологічний парк «Софіївка»
Ukraine · 1.3 km from Uman48.763° N 30.223° E
Облаухов Андрей Александрович · CC BY-SA 4.0 Sofiyivka, on the northern edge of Uman in central Ukraine, is one of the finest surviving landscape parks of the turn of the nineteenth century. It was laid out from 1796 by the Polish magnate Count Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki and named after his Greek-born wife Sofia; tradition has it that the park was his birthday present to her. Today it is the National Dendrological Park "Sofiyivka", a research institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, covering 179.2 hectares. It has been on Ukraine's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage since 2000, and in 2007 a public and expert vote named it one of the Seven Wonders of Ukraine.
Did you know? Work on the park began in 1796, two years before Potocki and Sofia were actually married in 1798.
02 Bodnant Garden
United Kingdom53.234° N 3.801° W
Image by fallonrw from Pixabay Bodnant Garden climbs a hillside above the Conwy valley in North Wales, looking west towards the Carneddau mountains. Covering about 80 acres, it is owned by the National Trust and listed at Grade I, the highest grade, on the Cadw/ICOMOS register of historic parks and gardens in Wales. It was the second garden the Trust accepted for its own sake, after Hidcote, when it was handed over in 1949, and in 2024 it received more than 274,000 visitors.
Did you know? Three generations of one family, Frederick, Charles and Martin Puddle, served as head gardeners here from 1920 until Martin's death in 2005.
03 Westonbirt Arboretum
United Kingdom · 26.2 km from Bath51.606° N 2.224° W
Image by ebor from Pixabay Westonbirt, The National Arboretum, is one of the best-known tree collections in Britain. It was begun in 1829 by the landowner Robert Stayner Holford on his estate in the southern Cotswolds, at the height of the Victorian enthusiasm for plant hunting, and his son George Holford carried the planting much further. After George's death in 1926 the estate passed to his nephew, the Earl of Morley; the Holford mansion became a girls' school, and in 1956 the arboretum was handed to the Forestry Commission. Since 2019 it has been run by Forestry England. The landscape is registered Grade I among England's historic parks and gardens.
Did you know? The Westonbirt Lime in Silk Wood is a ring of stems from one coppiced small-leaved lime, which may be anywhere from 1,000 to over 2,000 years old.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the most beautiful arboretum in the world?
- On our list, Sofiyivsky Park (Ukraine) ranks first, followed by Bodnant Garden (United Kingdom) and Westonbirt Arboretum (United Kingdom).
- What is the difference between an arboretum and a botanical garden?
- An arboretum specialises in trees and woody plants, grown as a living collection for study and display. A botanical garden covers a broader range of plants, from herbs to tropical species.
- Which country has the most beautiful arboretums?
- In our collection, the most come from the United Kingdom (2) and Ukraine (1).
- Who created Sofiyivka Park in Uman?
- It was created by Count Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki, who dedicated the park to his wife Sophia, after whom it is named.
- How many arboretums are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 3 arboretums in 2 countries. The United Kingdom has the most, with 2.