Andre Mollet was a French garden designer and writer active in England, as royal gardener to both Charles I and II, in the 17th century. Mollet came from a family of gardeners and is especially noted for writing the highly influential Le Jardin de plaisir (1651).
André Mollet became royal gardener to Queen Christina in Stockholm. His lasting record is his handsomely-printed folio, Le Jardin de plaisir ("The Pleasure Garden") [1], Stockholm 1651, which he illustrated with meticulous copperplate engravings after his own designs, and which, with an eye to a European aristocratic clientele, he published in Swedish, French and German. In his designs the rich patterning of parterres, which had formerly been a garden feature of interest in isolation, was for the first time arranged in significant relation to the plan of the house. Mollet's designs coordinated the elements of scythed turf—making its debut here as an essential element of garden design—with gravel paths, basins and fountains, parterres, bosquets and allées.
Mollet was summoned to England in the 1620s to lay out gardens for Charles I of England and perhaps the parterres at Wilton House,[1] but by 1633 he was in the service of Prince Frederick Henry of Orange, for whom he laid out parterres en broderie that included the lion rampant of the prince's coat-of-arms, in turf and clipped boxwood, set in colored gravels at Huis Honselaarsdijk, and at the prince's other main residence, Huis ter Nieuwburg near Rijswijk.
Bibliography
Pattacini, Laurence, 'Andre Mollet, Royal Gardener in St James's Park, London', Garden History, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Summer, 1998), pp. 3-18