a flower garden with beds and paths designed to form a pattern, the outdoor and botanical equivalent to an indoor Persian carpet; literally "on the ground" in French
a part of a garden with areas of flowers surrounded by low hedges in a formal pattern. Division of garden beds in an ornamental pattern. The parterre grew out of the knot garden, a medieval form of bed in which various plant types were separated from each other by hedges. In the 16th century, the hedges were replaced by wooden or leaden shapes or by lines of shells or coal, and the areas between were filled with colored sand or stone chips. The naturalistic English garden of the 18th century displaced the elaborate parterre
All Knot Gardens are parterres, but not all parterres form a knot The name parterre (pronounced PAR - tare) is from Old French 'par terre' literally translated 'on the ground' It is a flower garden having the beds and paths arranged to form a pattern This precise and informative definition comes to us from the site of Lakewold Gardens On this site you can visit their knot garden and their parterre You can tell someone has been pruning, pruning, pruning (Just can't seem to get past all that work)