Parterre - Examples

Examples

At Kensington Palace, then a suburb of London, the planting of the parterres was by Henry Wise, whose nursery was nearby at Brompton. In the engraving of 1707-1708, (illustration, right), the up-to-date Baroque designs of each section are clipped scrolling designs, symmetrical around a center, in low hedging punctuated by trees formally clipped into cones; however, their traditional 17th century layout, a broad central gravel walk dividing paired plats, each subdivided in four, appears to have survived from the Palace's former (pre-1689) existence as Nottingham House. Subsidiary wings have subsidiary parterres, with no attempt at overall integration.

At Prince Eugene's Belvedere Palace, Vienna, a sunken parterre before the facade that faced the city was flanked in a traditional fashion with raised walks from which the pattern could best be appreciated. To either side, walls with busts on herm pedestals backed by young trees screen the parterre from the flanking garden spaces. Formal baroque patterns have given way to symmetrical paired free scrolling rococo arabesques, against the gravel ground. Little attempt seems to have been made to fit the framework to the shape of the parterre. Beyond (in the shadowed near foreground) paired basins have central jets of water.

In the UK, modern parterres exist at Trereife Park in Penzance (Cornwall), Birr Castle in Ireland, at Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfriesshire and at Bodysgallen Hall near Llandudno. One of the largest in Britain is at Cliveden in Buckinghamshire; it consists of symmetrical wedge-shaped beds filled with catmint, santolina and senecio, edged with box hedges and with sentinel pyramids of yew at the corners and altogether covers an area of four acres.

Some early knot gardens have been covered over by lawn or other landscaping, but the original traces are still visible as undulations in the present day landscape. An example of this phenomenon is the early 17th century garden of Muchalls Castle in Scotland.