Hayrettin Karaca founded this arboretum on 13.5 hectares, and it now holds around 7,000 different plant species, subspecies, varieties and cultivated forms. The Culture Portal describes it as the first private arboretum in Türkiye and puts the number of visitors at about 15,000 a year. Its notable collections carry many important species and cultivars of maple, cherry, apple, magnolia, oak, birch, pine and spruce.
The work done here goes beyond keeping a collection. The arboretum takes university students on placement; being open to the public, it sets out to widen general knowledge of its subject; it supplies plant material to arboreta and botanical gardens elsewhere in the country; it trains gardeners; it exchanges seed with arboreta and botanical gardens around the world; and it goes on enlarging the collection and laying out new gardens within its grounds. The money for all of it comes from the nursery on the site, which is open every day of the week.
In June 2004 the International Dendrology Society gave the arboretum an award, presented to Hayrettin Karaca by the society's president at a ceremony held here on 27 June that year. The award had gone to fourteen arboreta or collection gardens worldwide before this; Karaca Arboretum was the fifteenth.
Getting there
- Access
- In Samanlı village on the Yalova-Termal road, 5 km from the city centre; the Samanlı or Termal minibuses from central Yalova get you there easily.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Yalova as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 6.6 °C in January to 23.6 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (113 mm) and lightest in July (25 mm). Long-term means for 1931-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
