French Architect Du Perac: French Gardens

In France it reached its most sophisticated form at the end of the sixteenth century. In 1582 the French architect Du Perac returned from a long stay in Italy, where he appears to have acquired the notion of treating the whole parterre as a unit, and relating each subdivision of it to the rest instead of planning each as an individual tour de force to be regarded on its own. Obviously if a whole garden was to be given up to one large design it must be seen from above, and if raised walks did not already exist they had to be made. Henri IV made in this way the famous mulberry walk around the flat and featureless Tuileries. Even later, when the French vista garden reached its fullest stage of development, the French still retained their fondness for this type of parterre, the compartiment de broderie, but by then terraces were provided only on one or at most on three sides, so that the parterre could form a base for the avenue. Historians are rarely inclined to allow the credit of inventing anything to anybody; it is their delight to observe the stream of influence and suggestion and to ignore the spontaneous combustion of an idea. It is certainly true that Du Perac came back from Italy with the idea and created the first compartiment de broderie at the Chateau of Anet, but it is not clear that he found the idea already developed in Italy; it certainly never flourished there as it did in France. It is probable that the notion of unifying a garden, which was already familiar to the Italians, combined with the rediscovery of the arabesque from Spain to produce these exquisite foliated shapes. It is wrong to suppose that flowers were gradually banished from the parterre; in so far as the parterre derived from the labyrinth they were never there, but in so far as the involved design within the beds was there to divide the flowers into their appropriate blocks then Du Perac virtually banished them. His compartiments de broderie could never serve such a subordinate purpose; they were the pride of the garden, the loveliest things there.