Parterre

A parterre is a part of a formal garden constructed on a level substrate, consisting of symmetrical patterns, made up by plant beds, plats, low hedges or coloured gravels, which are separated and connected by paths.

Later, in the 17th century Baroque garden, they became more elaborate and stylised, on the continent often using the parterre en broderie style of spreading and curving branches, derived from embroidery.

His inspiration in developing the 16th-century patterned compartimens (i.e., simple interlaces formed of herbs, either open and infilled with sand, or closed and filled with flowers) was the painter Etienne du Pérac, who returned from Italy to the Château d'Anet near Dreux, France, where he and Mollet were working.

The fully developed scrolling embroidery-like parterres en broderie first appear in Alexandre Francini's engraved views of the revised horticultural plans of Fontainebleau and Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1614.

By 1638, Jacques Boyceau described the range of designs in boxwood that a horticulturist should be able to cultivate:[4] Parterres are the low embellishments of gardens, which have great grace, especially when seen from an elevated position: they are made of borders of several shrubs and sub-shrubs of various colours, fashioned in different manners, as compartments, foliage, embroideries (passements), moresques, arabesques, grotesques, guilloches, rosettes, sunbursts (gloires), escutcheons, coats-of-arms, monograms and emblems (devises).

[citation needed] But these remained relatively rare in England, where many earlier knot gardens were replaced with simpler designs of "quincunxes, squares or rectangles of grass set in gravel with perhaps some topiary, statues or plants in pots at the corners".

A plat (in America entangled with the same word as used for a plot of building land) was a parterre section of plain grass lawn, perhaps with a central feature such as a fountain or statue, and small clipped trees at the corners.

A stretch of good lawn was much admired, and these were rather surprisingly popular, especially in England, where year-round rainfall usually meant summer watering was unnecessary to keep a green surface.

The English gardener Stephen Switzer wrote in 1718:[17]Bowling-green or plain Parterres, the Method of which they [the French] own to have receiv’d from England, .... [are] of the most Use, and is, above all, the beautifullest with us in England, on Account of the Goodness of our Turf, and that Decency and unaffected Simplicity which it affords to the Eye of the Beholder.On the continent a boulingrin (a mangled French version of "bowling-green") was a sunken compartment of fine lawn, typically found in the bosquet part of the garden rather than among the parterres.

[18] Several French writers were ready to concede the superiority of English grass, including Andre Mollet and Dezallier d'Argenville; apart from the climate some attributed it to the selection of the turf and the frequency and quality of the cutting.

They should consist only of large Grass-plots all of a Piece, or cut but little, and be encompassed with a Border of Flowers, separated from the Grass-work by a Path of Two or Three Foot wide, laid smooth and sanded over, to make the greater DistinctionAs well as grass, English writers including Samuel Pepys and Sir William Temple also congratulated themselves on the superiority of the native gravels.

In the 19th century parterres were revived in a somewhat different form, coinciding with the availability of carpet bedding, the annual mass planting of non-hardy flowers as segments of colour which constituted a design.

[26] By now a parterre often meant a collection of flower beds in fairly formal shapes, but often avoiding straight lines, arranged on a lawn, perhaps with some gravel paths, as at Waddesdon Manor, a new-build of the late 1870s.

A much larger number of Victorian parterres have survived in something like their original state, both in houses and public parks and other gardens, and these remain attractive to modern visitors.

Many restored parterres are increasingly threatened by fungi and insects, especially the box tree moth,[9] and alternative species are being explored, for example at RHS Wisley.

In an engraving from 1707 to 1708, the up-to-date Baroque designs of each section are clipped scrolling designs, symmetrical around a centre, in low hedging punctuated by trees formally clipped into cones; however, their traditional 17th century layout, a broad central gravel walk dividing paired plats, each subdivided in four, appears to have survived from the Palace's former (pre-1689) existence as Nottingham House.

At Prince Eugene's Belvedere Palace, Vienna, a sunken parterre before the façade that faced the city was flanked in a traditional fashion with raised walks from which the pattern could best be appreciated.

[28] In the UK, modern parterres exist at Trereife House in Penzance (Cornwall), at Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfriesshire and at Bodysgallen Hall near Llandudno.

One of the largest in Britain is at Cliveden in Buckinghamshire, which covers an area of 4 acres (1.6 ha; 160 a; 16,000 m2; 170,000 sq ft); it consists of symmetrical wedge-shaped beds filled with Nepeta ("catmint"), Santolina and Senecio, edged with box hedges.