Variant Form of the French garden: The Garden of Euphues

The ubiquitous Mollets were responsible for the only important variant form of the French garden, a variant in itself attractive and in its implications of great significance. There is no evidence who first laid out the Matte d'oie, or goose-foot, a half-circle from which diverge five avenues; there is no sure evidence of its existence in the sixteenth century, but it is a common feature of the seventeenth. Monarchs of the seventeenth century were accustomed to follow the hunt in horse-drawn carriages. Louis XIV `drove himself in a small open carriage, drawn by four ponies with five or six relays, and went alone, going full tilt with a skill that few professionals could equal and all the elegance which he habitually displayed'. Queen Anne, when she grew too large to follow on horseback, had a light horse-drawn chair constructed with extremely high wheels, `In this extraordinary and dangerous hunting equipage she was known to drive her fine strong hackney forty or fifty miles on a summer's afternoon.' Swift wrote of her: `She hunts in a chaise and drives furiously like Jehu and is a mighty hunter like Nimrod.' To make these jaunts possible great rides were cut through the forest, and if the rides were straight so much the faster could the royal huntress pursue, so much more easily could she see if the game crossed the ride even at a great distance. If rides were made to converge at key points a follower who had lost contact could look down several rides from one point and so rediscover the chase. Because Le Notre used this distinctive pattern in his planting it has been assumed too easily that he invented it, but the credit should probably go to the Mollets. Its use by Le Notre was usually in the distances of the park, and rarely if ever did he plan so that one of these radiating avenues ended at the chateau; even at Greenwich, where the ground plan suggests such a result, the rise of the ground makes the palace invisible from the patte d'oie at the park entrance. It was certainly the Mollets who reversed its position and used the patte d'oie as the basis of views outward, which Le Notre never did. In Andre Mollet's Le Jardin de Plaisir published in 1651 there is a symmetrical layout proposed for a moated chateau. Here the patte d'oie is an essential part of the axial design and is distant from the chateau only by the length of the principal parterre. At Drottningholm in Sweden the patte d'oie appears again in an unusual position, this time not close to the castle but where the garden abuts the park, thus still emphasizing its purpose as an outward-looking point.