Hedge Maze vs Parterre
迷路園 / パルテール（刺繍花壇）
Gardens that draw figures with hedges used as lines, both readable from above as a single pattern.
How to tell them apart. The box of a parterre stands ankle high and the whole can be taken in. The hedge of a maze rises above head height and hides the next corner.
Hedge Maze
A quarter of a garden where hedge walls are woven into passages and getting lost is itself the designed amusement. The whole figure shows only from above, while anyone standing inside sees walls and forks.
Parterre
A flat bed in which clipped box embroiders arabesques into the ground. It was designed to be looked down on from the floors above, turning the ground into ornament and gardening into graphic design.
| Hedge Maze | Parterre | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 16th century– | 17th century– |
| Family | Garden Styles | Garden Styles |
| Kind | Layout | Layout |
| Cues | Hedges above head height on both sides, cutting the line of sight at the next turn / Paths and walls readable as a single figure once seen from above / A dead end planted at each fork, with the path width never changing / A clearing or small structure set at the centre as the goal | Box arabesques / Gravel and turf as ground colors / Made for the view from above / Symmetrical development |
| Best used for | Giving a park or garden a section people stay inside rather than pass through · Building something that reads as a figure from above and as an experience on foot at the same time | Designing a forecourt that will be seen from upper floors or a stair · Laying a pattern at an institutional entrance that holds all year |
| Type | Choose a hedge species that holds leaf down to the ground, and keep it above eye level. | Keep the arabesque one constant width, set its crossings first |
| Composition | Allow one correct route to the centre, and spread the dead ends evenly around it. | Develop symmetrically about the axis, close with a single border |
| Material | Give the hedge enough thickness that no sight line passes through, and lay the path in gravel or earth. | Clipped box as line, gravel, turf and sand as ground colors |
| Caution | Making the passages long and narrow for the sake of a handsome plan puts closeness before the pleasure of being lost, and people turn back partway. | Placed where nobody can look down on it, the pattern never reads and only expensive clipping remains, its point entirely lost. |