The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests in the United States
25 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in the United States are Yellowstone National Park, Monument Valley and General Sherman. The list covers 25 gardens, parks and forests. Last updated 14 October 2026.
The United States created the first national park and then built a whole system around it, protecting landscapes of extraordinary range. The Colorado Plateau exposes layers of sandstone carved by rivers into canyons, buttes and hoodoos; the Sierra Nevada holds granite valleys and the largest trees on earth; and beneath Yellowstone a volcanic hotspot keeps the ground boiling. In the cities, nineteenth-century park builders brought a share of that scenery into urban life.
Yellowstone, established in 1872, has more geysers and hot springs than anywhere else on earth. Yosemite's valley is framed by the granite walls of El Capitan and Half Dome, and in Sequoia National Park the General Sherman tree is the largest single-stem tree known by volume. The Grand Canyon, cut by the Colorado River, reaches more than a mile deep, and Zion's canyon walls rise in cream and red sandstone.
The Southwest provides much of the rest. Monument Valley lifts sandstone buttes from the desert on Navajo land, Bryce Canyon fills its amphitheatres with orange hoodoos, and at Goosenecks State Park the San Juan River winds through deep, tight meanders. Canyon de Chelly shelters ancient cliff dwellings beneath red walls, and the Badlands of South Dakota are banded with layers of eroded sediment. In Manhattan, Central Park by Olmsted and Vaux gave the country its most famous city park.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yellowstone National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 2 | Monument Valley | Protected area | |
| 3 | General Sherman | Remarkable tree | |
| 4 | Bryce Canyon National Park | National park | |
| 5 | Central Park | Urban park | |
| 6 | Zion National Park | National park | |
| 7 | Sequoia National Park | National park | |
| 8 | Grand Canyon National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 9 | Yosemite National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 10 | Badlands National Park | National park | |
| 11 | Goosenecks State Park | Protected area | |
| 12 | Canyon de Chelly National Monument | Canyon | |
| 13 | Grizzly Giant | Remarkable tree | |
| 14 | Lone Cypress | Remarkable tree | |
| 15 | Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park | Canyon | |
| 16 | Tongass National Forest | Forest | |
| 17 | Mesa Verde National Park | National park | ✓ |
| 18 | General Grant Tree | Remarkable tree | |
| 19 | Angel Oak | Remarkable tree | |
| 20 | Longwood Gardens | Historic garden | |
| 21 | Goblin Valley State Park | Protected area | |
| 22 | Hoh Rainforest | Forest | |
| 23 | Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest | Forest | |
| 24 | Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park | Forest | |
| 25 | Lotusland | Botanical garden |
01 Yellowstone National Park
United States44.600° N 110.500° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- biosphere reserve
James St. John from Newark, Ohio · CC BY 2.0 That it needed protecting at all says something about what's underneath it. Yellowstone sits on top of one of the largest active volcanic systems on Earth, and the geothermal features scattered across the park — geysers, hot springs, mudpots, fumaroles — aren't a curiosity on the side, they're most of the reason the place exists as a park in the first place: it holds well over half of all the geysers on the planet.
Did you know? The ground is restless: Yellowstone records 1,000 to 3,000 small earthquakes a year.
02 Monument Valley
United States36.983° N 110.100° W
Image by ArtTower from Pixabay The shapes are a lesson in layered geology. At the bottom is soft Organ Rock Shale, which weathers into the sloping aprons; above it sits the thick, cliff-forming de Chelly Sandstone that makes the sheer faces; and many summits are protected by a hard cap of Shinarump conglomerate over Moenkopi beds. Where the cap survives, a butte keeps its flat top; where it has gone, the sandstone is whittled down into spires.
Did you know? Besides Stagecoach and The Searchers, John Ford also filmed Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon against these buttes.
03 General Sherman
United States36.582° N 118.751° W
Roman Tokman · CC BY-SA 4.0 Standing at its foot is less about reading numbers than about losing a sense of scale. The trunk rises almost without taper, a column of reddish bark, and the crown is so high above that it is hard to take in. In January 2006 the tree dropped its biggest branch, a limb more than 2 m thick and over 30 m long, which smashed part of the fence and cratered the paved path around the base; nobody saw it fall.
Did you know? The Kaweah colonists picked the Karl Marx name partly in protest at Sherman's role in the Indian Wars and the forced removal of Native tribes.
04 Bryce Canyon National Park
United States37.640° N 112.170° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by neufal54 from Pixabay The park lies high, with its rim at about 2,400 to 2,700 m, and its rim looks out over the Paria valley to the Kaiparowits Plateau. An 18-mile (29 km) scenic drive runs south along the rim to Rainbow Point, the highest spot at 2,775 m, and on clear days the view from there and from Yovimpa Point reaches Navajo Mountain and the Kaibab Plateau in Arizona, about 145 km away.
Did you know? Bryce Canyon Lodge was built in 1924 and 1925 from local timber and stone and is now a National Historic Landmark of 1920s park architecture.
05 Central Park
United States · 7.2 km from New York City40.782° N 73.966° W
Image by Josmanu1970 from Pixabay What the tidy Greensward plan doesn't advertise is what stood there before construction started. A settlement called Seneca Village occupied the land between what's now West 82nd and West 89th Streets — roughly 225 residents, two-thirds of them African American landowners, along with Irish immigrant families, with their own church and school, thirty-two years into a stable community.
Did you know? The Angel of the Waters on Bethesda Fountain, unveiled in 1873, made Emma Stebbins the first woman commissioned for a major public artwork in New York City.
06 Zion National Park
United States37.203° N 112.988° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Pexels from Pixabay Long before it was a park, it was a landscape with a name problem. Mormon pioneers who settled the area in the 1860s and 70s named it "Zion," the biblical term for a place of refuge, but not everyone agreed it deserved the name — one prominent local dissenter is said to have insisted it should be called "Not Zion," on the grounds that no ordinary canyon, however striking, should claim a name reserved for paradise.
Did you know? In 2014 rangers confirmed the first successful breeding of endangered California condors inside the park.
07 Sequoia National Park
United States36.565° N 118.773° W
Image by Kjjj3 from Pixabay Giant sequoia cones are serotinous, meaning they stay sealed until heat forces them open.
Did you know? Crystal Cave, a marble cave with more than 3.4 miles of surveyed passages, was discovered on 28 April 1918.
08 Grand Canyon National Park
United States36.055° N 112.122° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Filio from Pixabay Protection came slowly. Benjamin Harrison introduced the first bill for a national park here in 1882 and failed three times; as president he made the area a forest reserve in 1893. Theodore Roosevelt, who visited in 1903 and urged Americans to leave the canyon as it was, declared a national monument in 1908. Only on 26 February 1919 did Woodrow Wilson sign the act creating the national park, the fifteenth in the country.
Did you know? John Wesley Powell led the first expedition down the river in 1869, and he is credited with popularising the name Grand Canyon instead of Big Canyon.
09 Yosemite National Park
United States37.742° N 119.537° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Image by 12019 from Pixabay On its north side stands El Capitan, a single face of granite about 3,000 feet from base to rim, which became the proving ground of modern big-wall climbing: The Nose was first climbed in 1958 over 47 days of fixed ropes, freed by Lynn Hill in 1993, and in 2017 Alex Honnold climbed the Freerider route alone and without a rope in under four hours.
Did you know? Before the National Park Service existed, US Army cavalry ran the park, including the all-Black 9th Cavalry, the Buffalo Soldiers, between 1899 and 1913.
10 Badlands National Park
United States43.750° N 102.500° W
Image by victortran0107 from Pixabay What makes the Badlands unusual is how fast it is changing. In bare areas the soft rock erodes at about an inch a year, a pace that is visible within a human lifetime: formations soften, gullies deepen, and new fossils are washed out every spring. Those fossils are the other reason the place matters.
Did you know? Badlands fossils entered the scientific literature as early as 1846, when a titanothere from the area was described.
11 Goosenecks State Park
United States37.175° N 109.927° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by PapaTom64 from Pixabay The shape is inherited. Millions of years ago the San Juan wandered across a nearly level plain, swinging in lazy bends as lowland rivers do. Then the Monument Upwarp, part of the broader uplift of the Colorado Plateau, slowly raised the land beneath it. Rather than straightening out, the river held its course and cut downward as the ground rose, locking its old bends into solid rock.
Did you know? The Honaker Trail is the type locality of a rock unit named after it, and fossil crinoids and brachiopods from a Pennsylvanian sea can be seen along the way.
12 Canyon de Chelly National Monument
United States36.155° N 109.509° W
Image by ducken99 from Pixabay What sets the place apart from other red-rock canyons is that it has never stopped being lived in. People have farmed here for more than four thousand years. Ancestral Puebloans built their houses into alcoves in the cliffs and left the canyons around the mid-1300s; Hopi farmers came after them, and then the Navajo, for whom the canyon remains home. About forty Navajo families still live and farm inside the monument.
Did you know? During Kit Carson's 1864 campaign, Captain Albert Pfeiffer's detachment missed the canyon entrance in a snowstorm and marched through Canyon del Muerto instead.
13 Grizzly Giant
United States37.504° N 119.601° W
Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0 Current estimates put its age at about 3,000 years, give or take two and a half centuries; nineteenth-century enthusiasts guessed at many times that. The tree's scars tell the story of those millennia. Fire has consumed most of its bark and sapwood on one side, and in a single storm in 1942 it was struck by lightning six times.
14 Lone Cypress
United States · 7.3 km from Monterey36.569° N 121.965° W
Image by sarahtipton79 from Pixabay Monterey cypress is a rare tree in the wild: its natural range today is just two small relict groves near Carmel, one at Point Lobos and the other at Cypress Point, a short way along this same shore. It is the constant sea wind that gives old specimens their flattened, sculptural shape. The exact age of this one is unknown; it is thought to have taken root around the middle of the eighteenth century.
Did you know? German botanist Karl Hartweg named the species in July 1846, collecting near Monterey because the Mexican–American War made longer excursions unsafe.
15 Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park
United States · 16.6 km from Montrose38.580° N 107.728° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by misterfarmer from Pixabay The rock is what gives the place its gravity. The walls expose Precambrian gneiss and schist, metamorphic "basement" rock close to two billion years old, which resists erosion far better than the softer layers that once lay above it. The river began cutting into this hard core roughly two million years ago, and because it could not widen its course, it could only deepen it.
Did you know? Even through this hard metamorphic rock, the Gunnison River keeps cutting down at roughly an inch every hundred years.
16 Tongass National Forest
United States56.750° N 133.000° W
Forest Service Photography · Public domain The landscape is built from water as much as land. The forest takes in the Alexander Archipelago's maze of islands and channels, deep glacial fjords such as Tracy Arm, and the summits of the Coast Mountains along the border with British Columbia. Glaciers still pour off the icefields, among them the Mendenhall Glacier just outside Juneau, where the Forest Service opened its first visitor centre anywhere in 1962.
Did you know? The Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center near Juneau, opened in 1962, was the first visitor centre in the US National Forest System.
17 Mesa Verde National Park
United States37.260° N 108.494° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
- Dark Sky Place
Image by kaylee from Pixabay People used the mesa for thousands of years before the famous houses appeared. Hunters passed through in the Archaic era, Basketmaker families later farmed corn on the mesa top and lived in pithouses, and from roughly 750 CE their descendants began grouping into above-ground pueblos with ceremonial chambers known as kivas.
Did you know? Rancher Richard Wetherill and his companion Charlie Mason came upon Cliff Palace in December 1888, spotting it from the mesa rim.
18 General Grant Tree
General Grant
United States36.748° N 118.971° W
Eric Kilby from Somerville, MA, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0 What strikes a visitor is less its height than its mass. The trunk rises like a cinnamon-coloured column of fibrous, fire-scarred bark, barely tapering for dozens of metres, with a broad, rounded crown of heavy limbs far above. Giant sequoias depend on fire to open their cones and clear the ground for seedlings, and the thick spongy bark lets them survive burns that kill other trees; the scars on the Grant show fires it has lived through.
19 Angel Oak
United States32.718° N 80.079° W
Image by RegalShave from Pixabay How old it is nobody knows. Far greater ages have been claimed and are still repeated, but estimates of about 400 to 500 years are more widely accepted, and even those are debated. The name comes not from the heavens but from Justus Angel and his wife Martha Waight Tucker Angel, former owners of the land.
Did you know? In 2008 Samantha Siegel, then 26, launched a Save the Angel Oak petition against housing planned beside the tree; the developer later went bankrupt.
20 Longwood Gardens
United States39.871° N 75.675° W
P. Hughes · CC BY-SA 4.0 The story begins with trees. In 1906 a timber dealer was preparing to fell the old arboretum planted on the farm of the Peirce family, and Pierre S. du Pont, head of the du Pont chemical company, bought the property to save it. The modest brick Peirce-du Pont House, begun by Joshua Peirce in 1730, is the oldest building on the estate and served du Pont as a country retreat.
Did you know? The sunken marble floor of the conservatory's Exhibition Hall is regularly flooded with a few inches of water to mirror the seasonal displays.
21 Goblin Valley State Park
United States38.567° N 110.710° W
- Dark Sky Place
Image by Steppinstars from Pixabay The goblins are carved from Entrada sandstone, laid down in the Jurassic around 170 million years ago on an ancient tidal flat, in alternating bands of sandstone, siltstone and shale. Networks of joints split the beds into blocks; their edges and corners, exposed on more sides, weathered faster than their faces, rounding each block into a knob.
Did you know? In 2013 a group leader deliberately toppled a balanced goblin while a companion filmed it; the two later pleaded guilty to criminal mischief.
22 Hoh Rainforest
United States47.861° N 123.925° W
Sualkdd · CC BY-SA 3.0 Every branch of the old bigleaf maples is wrapped in moss that hangs in long green curtains, ferns sprout from the crooks of limbs, and lichens drape the lower canopy, so that the light reaching the floor is filtered and green even at midday.
Did you know? A single bigleaf maple can carry more than 25 kilograms of clubmoss, licorice fern and other plants living on its branches.
23 Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest
United States · 19.2 km from Bishop37.386° N 118.179° W
Image by PatternPictures from Pixabay The most famous of them is Methuselah, a tree in the Methuselah Grove that was sampled in 1957 by the dendrochronologist Edmund Schulman and Tom Harlan, who counted 4,789 annual rings and placed its germination around 2833 BC. That makes it the oldest confirmed non-clonal living organism known, although a later attempt to reproduce the count, hampered by a missing core, arrived at a somewhat younger age.
Did you know? Bristlecones compete poorly on good soils but often dominate pale dolomite slopes where few other plants manage to grow.
24 Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park
United States · 8.7 km from Crescent City41.782° N 124.101° W
- UNESCO natural beauty
Chris Rycroft from Madison, Wisconsin, United States · CC BY 2.0 The Smith River, which runs through the park, is California's last major undammed river, and its clear green water is part of the beauty here. At the confluence of Mill Creek and the Smith lies Stout Memorial Grove, where an easy loop of under a kilometre winds among trees of enormous girth on a flat river terrace.
Did you know? Richard Preston's 2007 book The Wild Trees described the grove but kept its location secret to protect it from crowds.
25 Lotusland
United States · 6.5 km from Santa Barbara34.443° N 119.657° W
brewbooks from near Seattle, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0 The ground had been gardened long before her. In 1882 the nurseryman Ralph Kinton Stevens bought the land, called it Tanglewood and grew palms, lemons and other subtropical plants; in 1893 he published what is described as the first California nursery catalogue devoted entirely to tropical and subtropical plants.
Did you know? The Topiary Garden holds a floral clock about 8 metres across and a zoo of 26 topiary animals, including a camel, a gorilla and a giraffe.
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 are the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in the United States?
- On our list, Yellowstone National Park ranks first, followed by Monument Valley and General Sherman.
- How deep is the Grand Canyon?
- The Grand Canyon is more than a mile deep, reaching about 1,800 metres at its deepest point. It is around 446 kilometres long.
- Who designed Central Park?
- Central Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, whose Greensward Plan won the design competition in 1858. It became a model for public parks across the United States.
- Why are the Badlands striped?
- The Badlands are made of layers of sediment and volcanic ash laid down over millions of years. Each layer has a different colour and hardness, and erosion exposes them as bands across the buttes and pinnacles.
- How many gardens, parks and forests are on this list in the United States?
- The list covers 25 gardens, parks and forests.