The garden of the French court, perfected by André Le Nôtre at Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles: a great axis from the house to the horizon, embroidered parterres by the house, blocks of woodland cut into green rooms, long allées, and still sheets of water.
The French took the Italian garden to flat ground. Without a hillside to give them levels and falling water, they made the garden a plane to be seen from the house, organised by perspective. Claude Mollet laid out embroidered parterres at Anet in the 1580s; Jacques Boyceau, superintendent of the royal gardens, designed those of the Luxembourg for Marie de Médicis and wrote the first French treatise on design, published in 1638, which asks that parterres be placed where they are seen from above (Parterres to be seen from above). André Mollet carried the manner to England, the Netherlands and Sweden and set out the order of its parts (The order of a royal garden).
André Le Nôtre (1613–1700), son and grandson of royal gardeners, made it a style. At Vaux-le-Vicomte (1656–61), for the finance minister Nicolas Fouquet, he worked with the architect Louis Le Vau and the painter Charles Le Brun on a single composition of house and garden: a main axis about a kilometre and a half long, parterres de broderie by the house, then pools, then a canal hidden in a cross-valley until the visitor reaches its edge, then a grotto and a slope rising to a statue of Hercules. The king, Louis XIV, saw it at the fête of August 1661; within weeks Fouquet was arrested, and Le Nôtre, Le Vau and Le Brun were set to work at Versailles.
Versailles, laid out from 1662 and enlarged for forty years, is the type at its largest. From the palace terrace the axis runs over the water parterre, down to the Latona fountain, along the lawn of the Tapis Vert and on to the Grand Canal, 1,670 metres long, with a cross arm of more than a kilometre. Either side of the central axis, blocks of woodland, the bosquets, hold hidden rooms with fountains, theatres of water and dancing floors, each a surprise. Radiating avenues, the patte d’oie, carry the geometry out into the forest. Dézallier d’Argenville’s Théorie et pratique du jardinage (1709) turned the practice into rules: parterres by the house, woods beyond, the allées proportioned to their length, and a garden that always seems larger than it is (Parterres by the house, woods beyond, The allée widens with its length).
The planting was the material of an architecture. Dwarf box drew the scrolls of the parterre de broderie on beds of coloured gravel, brick dust or coal; hornbeam was clipped into tall green walls, the palissades, that lined the allées and enclosed the bosquets; lime, elm and later horse chestnut made the avenues, clipped on the sides into green arcades; yew was cut into obelisks and cones along the edges of the parterres; and orange trees in tubs stood out in summer from the orangery. Flowers grew in narrow borders, the plates-bandes, round the parterres.
From Versailles the style went to every court of Europe: to Het Loo in the Netherlands, Herrenhausen in Hanover, Schönbrunn, Peterhof, La Granja and Caserta. In the Netherlands, on small flat plots cut by drainage canals, it became intimate, with compartments of box, flowers, lead statues and topiary; William III brought this Dutch version to Hampton Court in 1689, and the nurserymen George London and Henry Wise planted it across England. In England it lasted barely thirty years more before the landscape garden swept most of it away.