parterre
parterre
French
“The parterre — a formal garden of geometric beds seen at its most extravagant at Versailles — simply means 'on the ground' in French, a deliberately modest name for a form of garden design that sometimes covered acres and required the labor of dozens.”
Parterre is French for 'on the ground' or 'along the ground': par (by, along) + terre (earth, ground). The Latin terra (earth) gives terre its ancestry, and from terra comes territory, terrain, terrace, and terrarium — a family of words grounded, literally, in the earth. The French term in garden use meant a garden laid out at ground level in a formal pattern, typically seen from a raised terrace, balcony, or the principal rooms of a house. The name is almost studiously plain — it says nothing about what the garden contains or how it is arranged, only that it is on the ground and intended to be looked at.
The parterre as a distinct garden type was codified in French garden design of the 16th and 17th centuries, building on the Italian Renaissance garden tradition of formal compartments. André Mollet's Le Jardin de plaisir (1651) and André Le Nôtre's work at Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles established the parterre de broderie — the embroidery parterre — as the summit of garden design ambition. These were elaborate patterns of clipped box arranged in scrolling, curvilinear designs that, viewed from above, resembled the embroidered patterns of court dress. Le Nôtre's parterres at Versailles were designed to be seen from the first-floor windows of the palace — the king's view, the commanding view, the view that made the garden legible as design.
The parterre de broderie was not the only type. Parterres de gazon used grass and gravel in geometric compartments; parterres à l'anglaise used lawn almost exclusively; parterres d'eau were great flat basins of water reflecting the sky. Each type organized the horizontal plane of the garden into a formal composition, each presupposing a raised viewpoint from which the composition could be read. The parterre was garden as plan, garden as floor — something to be looked down at as much as walked through.
English garden design adopted the parterre enthusiastically in the late 17th century, particularly under William and Mary's Dutch-influenced court. The gardens of Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace, and many country houses featured elaborate parterres that were subsequently swept away — some violently — by the landscape movement of the 18th century. The restoration of formal gardens in the 19th century brought the parterre back, and today the parterre at Versailles, carefully maintained and periodically replanted, remains the form's greatest surviving example: an outdoor carpet of living pattern visible from the Galerie des Glaces.
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Today
The parterre is a garden that flatters the viewer — specifically the viewer who stands above it. At Versailles, the parterre was designed for the king's window: a composition whose logic only fully reveals itself from elevation. The ground-level visitor walks through the pattern without being able to read it, as if navigating the letters of an inscription you cannot step back to see.
This spatial argument — that gardens have a correct viewpoint, and that viewpoint is often elevated — is quietly political. The parterre says: someone has the view from above, and the garden was made for them.
The word's very modesty — on the ground, along the ground — deflects from this. It names the position of the garden, not the position of the viewer. But the viewer was always understood.
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