The Parterre: Its Design and Meaning
The parterre — a flat, ornamental ground composition viewed from above — is the defining feature of the European formal garden between 1550 and 1750. Its development from sixteenth-century Italian knot gardens through the great French parterres de broderie to the simpler Dutch and English grass parterres tells the larger story of formal garden taste.
Italian origins
Sixteenth-century Italian knot gardens — interlaced patterns in clipped low hedging filled with coloured gravels or flowers — were the seed. The parterres of the Villa Medici and Boboli still preserve sixteenth-century examples.
French perfection
Claude Mollet and André Mollet developed the parterre de broderie ('embroidery parterre') in the early seventeenth century — flowing arabesque patterns in box edging filled with coloured earths and gravels. Le Nôtre at Versailles brought this to its monumental scale.
Parterre de pièces coupées
Cut-piece parterres, with grass or flowers in geometric panels separated by gravel paths, were a simpler alternative used in less prestigious locations.
Parterre à l'anglaise
Grass parterres edged with low hedges and bands of flower or shrub planting were the most influential late variant, easily adapted for the English country house in the early eighteenth century.
Decline and survival
The English landscape movement swept away most parterres in Britain by 1800. France, the Netherlands and Germany preserved them; Italy never fully abandoned them. The Edwardian period saw a revival; the late twentieth century saw scholarly reconstruction.
Where to see surviving parterres
Versailles, Vaux-le-Vicomte, Het Loo (1980s restoration to 1690s plan), Drottningholm, Schönbrunn, Caserta, Villandry, La Granja.
Explore on the map
All of the gardens mentioned in this article are pinned on the interactive map. Use it to plan a route, group nearby sites into a single trip, or compare gardens by style and season.