There’s probably nowhere better to begin an exploration of woody and gardenesque places along the Bosphorus than at the privately owned Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Emirgan, opened in 2002 and poised midway on the European side of the historic strait, just north of the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge. Its east-facing garden, if not Istanbul’s most botanically rich, is nonetheless a place of cherished calm above a busy coastal road and, with its cascade of happy plants, gloriously verdant in all seasons, a good example of the city’s horticultural vigour. Moreover, a few of the museum’s interior walls are home to a small permanent exhibition of Turkish mainstream and Impressionist paintings (little known outside Turkey) depicting nearby waterside pleasure grounds.

In its own grounds many specimen trees are thoughtfully labelled, giving information about a plant’s botanical family, its Latin and Turkish names and provenance. Thus, of the edible persimmon, Diospyros kaki, widely seen throughout the municipality, we learn it is one of the Ebenaceae, a family of some 800 species, including the much-treasured carpenter’s ebony – think an old piano’s black notes – found in tropical and warmer temperate regions of the world. The label tells us it is known as Trabzon hurması in Turkey and that it emanates from Japan and China (Japonya and Çin). It’s a brief botanical briefing, hugely helpful to visitors who want to know exactly what they’re looking at.

The Bosphorus is famously unique in several ways, with myriad beauties prized since antiquity. Let the octogenarian John Freely whet the gardener’s appetite: “…both sides are well-wooded, especially with cypresses, umbrella-pines, plane-trees, horse-chestnuts, terebinths [Pistacia palaestina] and Judas trees. The red [actually cyclamen pink] blossoms of the latter in spring, mingled with the mauve flowers of the ubiquitous wisteria, and the red and white candles of the chestnuts, pervaded by the songs of nightingales and blackbirds, give the Bosphorus at that season an even more superlative beauty.” Istanbul-born Hüseyin Zekâi Pasha’s large (96 x 136cm) 1897 painting of Yıldız Park in the Sabancı Collection (above) makes good sense of its location and extensive woods. In the distance lies the Sea of Marmara and old Stamboul under a nascent sunset, while in the foreground there stands the distinctive mix of coniferous and broadleaf woods that can be enjoyed in the park to this day. While the painting’s scenic sweep defies any accurate identification of individual trees, it’s fair to assume they include such native familiars as the beech, chestnut and hornbeam that populate the Belgrade Forest a few miles to the north.

Yıldız Park, with its ornate Çadır and Malta banqueting pavilions, is the former imperial garden of Abdülhamid’s Yıldız Palace, on the site of a royal hunting ground dating back to the time of Süleyman the Magnificent. Today its blossoming treescape comprises a lush muddle of evergreen Magnolia grandiflora, Judas trees flowering in March on naked branches, aromatic bay and horse chestnut, set among numerous kinds of oak. From its topmost heights Yıldız Park allows fine views to and across the Bosphorus to Istanbul’s Anatolian hills, partially hiding a far-reaching expanse of new suburbs where more than half the city’s population now lives.

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Issue 52, Spring 2015 Istanbul Unwrapped: Bosphorus Requiem
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