Proportion and Symmetry in Gardens: French Gardens

How far removed this art was from our modern notions of gardening is shown by the fact that designers of embroidery turned freely from silk to parterre and parterre back to silk and used flowers more freely on silk than they ever did on the ground. The compartiment de broderie is closer to the Tailor of Gloucester's waistcoat than to an herbaceous border. It is enough to compare one of these designs brought to France in 1582 with those published by Jan Vredeman de Vries in 1583 to see the extent of the revolution that was made at the Chateau of Anet. Claude Mollet, Henri of Navarre's gardener, head of a family of great gardeners, wrote in 1618 Le Theatre des Plans et Jardinages. This book is the early bible of the parterrist and the doctrine taught in it was carried by Mollet's sons throughout the world. The essential feature is perfect symmetry and, though lavender, thyme, mint and marjoram could be used, Mollet took particular pride in having popularized the use of box because it suffered no seasonal change. The success of box was immediate; not only was it slow-growing and obedient, easy to shape as one wished, but it provided that dark emphasis which the cypress gave to the Italian garden and yet remained within bounds as the cypress would not do. Only fastigiate trees and shrubs were allowed in the parterre itself, spreading sorts only obscured the pattern; later the purists allowed no trees at all but in these early days a cypress or shaped box was allowed to form a central point or to emphasize corners. The greatest French exponent of this art was Boyceau, who practiced in the early seventeenth century and wrote a book which was published after his death in 1638. This book contains some of the earliest attempts to reduce the art of gardening to principles. He particularly emphasized the need for proportion; the height of trees and hedges had to be carefully related to the length and breadth of paths. But as well as proportion and symmetry he demands variety: `I consider it very wearisome', he wrote, `when gardens are all laid out in straight lines, or divided into squares, four, six or nine, without variation. He is the herald of the great period of French gardening and his principles of symmetry, proportion and variety are the keynote of what followed. The compartiment de broderie was not the only kind of parterre.