The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests in Canada
5 places ยท updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in Canada are Banff National Park, Gros Morne National Park and Stanley Park. The list covers 5 gardens, parks and forests. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Canada's parks protect landscapes on a continental scale, shaped by mountain building in the west, ancient rock in the east and the ice sheets that covered almost the whole country. The national park system began here in the 1880s, and alongside the wilderness the cities created parks and gardens of their own, from coastal forest kept within a city to a garden grown inside a disused quarry.
Banff National Park, founded in 1885 as Canada's first, holds glacial lakes such as Lake Louise and Moraine Lake beneath the peaks of the Rockies. Gros Morne in Newfoundland is famous for the Tablelands, where rock from the Earth's mantle lies exposed at the surface, and for landlocked fjords. Stanley Park in Vancouver is a peninsula of forest ringed by a seawall, set aside in 1888. Hopewell Rocks on the Bay of Fundy are sandstone flowerpot stacks that stand in the sea at high tide and on the seabed at low tide. The Butchart Gardens near Victoria began in the early 1900s when Jennie Butchart planted a sunken garden in her family's exhausted limestone quarry.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Banff National Park | Protected area | |
| 2 | Gros Morne National Park | National park | โ |
| 3 | Stanley Park | Urban park | |
| 4 | Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park | Protected area | |
| 5 | Butchart Gardens | Historic garden |
01 Banff National Park
Canada ยท 2 km from Banff51.167ยฐ N 115.550ยฐ W
Image by NUNZG from Pixabay The lakes are what people come for. Lake Louise, with the Chateau Lake Louise hotel at one end and a glacier at the other, and Moraine Lake, about 15 km away beneath the Valley of the Ten Peaks, are among the most photographed views in Canada.
Did you know? The elk now common around the town descend in part from 57 animals brought in from Yellowstone National Park in 1917.
02 Gros Morne National Park
Canada49.689ยฐ N 57.738ยฐ W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by Canadian-Nature-Visions from Pixabay The Tablelands, between Trout River and Woody Point, are the most startling sight. They are made of peridotite, a rock from the Earth's mantle so poor in nutrients and so rich in toxic metals that almost nothing grows on it. The result, in the middle of green Newfoundland, is a bare, rust-brown plateau that looks like a desert; underneath the weathered crust, the rock is dark green.
Did you know? Here the boundary between Earth's crust and mantle, the Mohoroviฤiฤ discontinuity, lies exposed at the surface, a site recognised by the International Union of Geological Sciences.
03 Stanley Park
Canada ยท 3 km from Vancouver49.300ยฐ N 123.140ยฐ W
Image by MICHOFF from Pixabay Long before it was a park the land belonged to Coast Salish peoples. A large village called Xwayxway stood where Lumberman's Arch is today, with longhouses dozens of metres long, and the Squamish and Musqueam used the peninsula for thousands of years; in 1888 residents were forced out to make way for the park road.
Did you know? The 700- to 800-year-old Hollow Tree was saved from road widening in 1910 thanks to lobbying by a photographer who earned his living there.
04 Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park
Canada ยท 32.6 km from Moncton45.823ยฐ N 64.573ยฐ W
Image by Graham-H from Pixabay The result is the Flowerpot Rocks: sea stacks of soft sandstone and conglomerate, standing 12 to 21 metres tall, undercut at the base by that relentless tidal erosion while trees keep growing improbably out of the flat tops, giving each formation the look of a plant crammed into a clay pot.
Did you know? The bases erode faster than the tops, because seawater attacks them twice a day while the crowns are only exposed to rain and frost.
05 Butchart Gardens
Canada ยท 17.1 km from Victoria48.565ยฐ N 123.469ยฐ W
Image by Photoman from Pixabay The Sunken Garden is best seen first from above: a bowl of lawns, flower beds and trees laid out on the old quarry floor, enclosed by cliffs that were once a working face of stone and are now curtained in green. It is still the largest section of the gardens and an early, remarkable case of turning an industrial wound into something beautiful.
Did you know? In 1939 the Butcharts gave the gardens to their grandson Ian Ross as a present for his 21st birthday.
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 โ 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 are the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in Canada?
- On our list, Banff National Park ranks first, followed by Gros Morne National Park and Stanley Park.
- Why does the Bay of Fundy have such high tides?
- The bay's length and funnel shape make the water slosh in rhythm with the ocean tide, amplifying it. The difference between high and low water can exceed 15 metres, among the highest in the world.
- What are the Tablelands in Gros Morne?
- They are a barren plateau of peridotite, rock from the Earth's mantle pushed to the surface when ancient plates collided. They helped earn the park its UNESCO listing in 1987.
- Which is the oldest national park in Canada?
- Banff National Park, established in 1885 around the hot springs of Sulphur Mountain, is Canada's first national park.
- How many gardens, parks and forests are on this list in Canada?
- The list covers 5 gardens, parks and forests.