Approach the house by a wide avenue of double or quadruple rows of trees; behind it lay the parterres of embroidery, then parterres of grass, then the groves with their walks and fountains, and close the walks with perspectives that deceive the eye.
Parterres to be seen from above
Lay the parterres where they are seen from above, from the windows of the house or from a raised terrace, since their patterns are lost to someone standing among them; keep everything near them low.
Boyceau’s treatise (1638) is the first in French to treat the garden as design. A parterre is a flat pattern, and a flat pattern can only be read from above and at a distance: on the ground, the eye sees only the nearest beds edge-on. Hence the parterre is placed immediately below the principal rooms or a terrace, and nothing tall is allowed in it. His plates show some of the first parterres de broderie, scrolls of box laid out like embroidery on a ground of coloured earth.
The rule fixed the relation of house and garden for a century: the house looks down on the parterre, and the parterre is designed for the house’s windows.
Related rules
Make the parterre oblong rather than square, since figures somewhat oblong look better on the ground than square ones; later practice made it as broad as the front of the house and about twice as long.
parterre oblong; later practice: width ≈ house front, length ≈ 2 × width
Proportion the width of an allée to its length: a walk of about 100 toises (some 200 m) should be 5 or 6 toises wide, one of 200 toises 7 or 8, and so on, so that a long walk does not seem to narrow to a slot in the distance.
100 toises long → 5–6 wide · 200 → 7–8 · 300 → 9–10 · 400 → 10–12 (1 toise ≈ 1.95 m)
Organise the whole garden on one axis from the centre of the house to the horizon; lay out the parts symmetrically about it, and use water, slopes and hidden changes of level so that the view along it reveals the garden by stages.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Parterres to be seen from above”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/boyceau-parterre-from-above. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.