Mollet Gardens: The Garden of Euphues

The logical conclusion of the tendency is reached at the castle of Fredensborg in Denmark, where the patte d'oie springs now from the very facade of the castle and consists of seven diverging avenues instead of the usual five. These two Scandinavian examples date from about 1660. In 1661 Andre and Gabriel Mollet were in England as the King's gardeners, but in 1658 the Protector had supplied them with warrants to travel to Hamburg. We can assume that these plans were made during this absence; how long they had been in England before is not known. In 1660 Pepys watched the canal being dug in St. James's Park, clearly also to a Mollet design. Here the pane d'oie based upon the Horse Guards' Parade carried the canal up a slightly off-centre avenue. Though totally unrelated to St. James's Palace it is still the major feature at the principal point of entrance to the Park and is designed to carry the eye outward several directions rather than onward in the Le Notre manner in one direction only. The final achievement of the Mollet type of garden was at Hampton Court, where, as at Fredensborg but on a nobler scale, the patte d'oie becomes the famous Fountain Court based primarily upon the eastern facade of the palace. These Mollet gardens must not be regarded merely as a watered-down version of Le Notre. If they did not actually precede Le Notre, they were at least contemporary: the patte d'oie shown in Le Jardin de Plaisir was published in the first year of Vaux. What is more important than mere precedency is that these gardens have a quite different function: although they are vista gardens in the sense that one looks down long narrowing avenues, these avenues nearly always have a point of termination; they are not left to float into a woolly eternity like those of Versailles and there is no attempt made to suggest that the garden (and the lord's domain) goes on for ever; the boundary may be distant, but it is apparent. Even more important is that the extremities of the garden and the park are now directly related to the house and from every distant point the house becomes visible; the owner can go forth and admire his own dwelling from a variety of different aspects, a form of variety which a Le Notre garden did not provide. This difference of approach became fully significant seventy years later. In England the Revolution of 1688, when William of Orange became King, brought for a time the English and Dutch, always close, into even closer relationship. It is true that both in Holland and England there was full acknowledgement of French leadership in gardening matters. Two of the very rare letters still in existence written by Le Notre are addressed to the Earl of Portland, William III's Ambassador at Paris.