Gardens and the Levels of Ground: French Gardens

This is the root cause of the difference between the Italian villa and the French chateau: the first was a highly developed summer house, a luxurious picnic hut, the second a complete world containing all that the owner required, city house and hunting box combined. The cause of this difference in habit was chiefly the indiscipline of French cities and of Paris in particular. French kings lived outside Paris because since the days of Louis XI with few exceptions they had found it safer that way; Paris lost its kings for the very same reason that in the fourteenth century Rome for a time lost its bishops. The stinking mob that filed into the Tuileries during the Fronde to assure themselves that the Dauphin was asleep in his bed gave that same Dauphin a decided preference for country life and played some part in building Versailles. Because French gardens continued to be on level ground or upon very slight inclines long after the Italians had taken to the hills, certain things followed. First, it was much easier to obtain still water than cascades and fountains. Second, views could be had only by means of protracted and scrupulously organized vistas. Third, though terraces existed they tended to be less high, less frequent, and architecturally less important. Finally, as the lie of the ground did not always and obviously demand a terrace at one end of every garden, elevated walks continued to be constructed on the medieval principle around all four sides long after this had ceased in Italy. It was for the fourth reason that the French particularly took to the parterre; and it was because of the parterre that raised walks continued to be made when one would have expected these pale echoes of the battlement walk along the curtain wall of a medieval castle to have faded quite away. A parterre was originally a level place in a garden. The word is first recorded in use in the middle of the sixteenth century and is derived from parterre on the ground. By 1600 an influential French gardening book claimed that the word derived from parterre to divide. Although the later derivation is wrong, it is this conception of a parterre an arrangement of subdivisions which best conveys what a parterre came to be. Nevertheless it is worth remembering that the French, who particularly developed the garden seen as a vertical picture, should also have contributed most to the notion of the garden seen as a horizontal one, for that essentially is the nature of a parterre: it is on the earth and to be looked down upon.