In response to protests against the overdevelopment of Istanbul and the privatization of its public spaces, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) announced their initiative to build more public parks in cities across the country. Rather than calling them public parks, it chose a late-Ottoman-era name for these spaces. They were called “millet bahçeleri,” literally translated as “the gardens of the people of a nation.” The decision to utilize a late Ottoman era term points to the neo-Ottomanist ideologies of the AKP, and suggests the desire to locate a model of economic growth and urban reform that predates the formation of the Turkish Republic. Since 2018, several new “nation's gardens” have been established within the new high-rise communities popping up in Istanbul’s expanding periphery. While the gardens are billed as efforts to alleviate the social and ecological ailments of Istanbul’s unbridled growth, in fact, they are an outgrowth of urban development and redevelopment plans that displace residents from the city center and further contribute to urban sprawl. These projects are fueled by the construction and tourism sector and real estate speculation to feed a failing national economy. This paper compares the design and use of these new "nation's gardens" to the appearance and use of more longstanding recreational greenspaces in Istanbul to discuss how the more historical sites serve as containers of Istanbul's cultural identity, its histories and its natural habitats. Yet the government's quest to constantly rehabilitate and "revitalize" these more historical greenspaces--often upholding the aesthetics of the newly constructed and neatly landscaped "nation's gardens" as a model--threatens to sever their connection to urban history and damage their existence as natural habitats for non-human species.