A parterre is a part of a formal garden constructed on a level substrate, consisting of symmetrical patterns, made up by plant beds, plats, low hedges or coloured gravels, which are separated and connected by paths. Typically it was the part of the garden nearest the house, perhaps after a terrace. The view of a parterre from inside the house, especially from the upper floors, was a major consideration in its design. The word "parterre" was and is used both for the whole part of the garden containing parterres and for each individual section between the "alleys".

The pattern or the borders of the beds may be marked by low, tightly pruned, evergreen hedging, and their interiors may be planted with flowers or other plants or filled with mulch or gravel. Parterres need not have any flowers at all, and the originals from the 17th and 18th centuries had far fewer than modern survivals or reconstructions. Statues or small evergreen trees, clipped as pyramids or other shapes, often marked points in the pattern, and an allée of medium-sized trees often ran along the side. Otherwise, the parterre was normally an area of openness, with the various elements very low, contrasting with the height of the house, and with the taller areas of the garden beyond. This made the parterre both a place to be seen - typically everyone walking in the parterre, and observers from around it, could see everyone else - but also a place for the most private conversations, as no one else could approach without being seen. The paths are constituted with gravel or (much less often in historical examples) with turf grass.

French parterres developed from the patterned compartments of French Renaissance gardens, what are called in England "knot gardens". Later, in the 17th century Baroque garden, they became more elaborate and stylised, on the continent often using the parterre en broderie style of spreading and curving branches, derived from embroidery. The French formal garden parterre inspired many similar parterres throughout Europe, though the parterres in the gardens of Versailles are rather muted; those in palace gardens in the Holy Roman Empire and in eventually Russian-controlled eastern Europe, are often more extensive and extravagant.

Parterre-style areas reappeared in many large gardens from the mid-19th century, now much more lavishly planted with bedded-out flowers, and with less strictly geometrical designs. From around the mid-20th century, as interest in Baroque gardens revived, garden designers have made many attempts to recreate or to restore Baroque parterres, at least as regards the layout; planting often continues to be much thicker, and the height of hedges higher, than would have been the case in the originals.^{[citation needed]}

Claude Mollet, from a dynasty of nurserymen-designers that lasted into the 18th century, developed the parterre in France. His inspiration in developing the 16th-century patterned compartimens (i.e., simple interlaces formed of herbs, either open and infilled with sand, or closed and filled with flowers) was the painter Etienne du Pérac, who returned from Italy to the Château d'Anet near Dreux, France, where he and Mollet were working. Around 1595, Mollet introduced compartment-patterned parterres to the royal gardens of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Fontainebleau. The fully developed scrolling embroidery-like parterres en broderie first appear in Alexandre Francini's engraved views of the revised horticultural plans of Fontainebleau and Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1614.

Clipped boxwood met with resistance from horticultural patrons for its "naughtie smell" as the herbalist Gervase Markham described it. By 1638, Jacques Boyceau described the range of designs in boxwood that a horticulturist should be able to cultivate:

Parterres are the low embellishments of gardens, which have great grace, especially when seen from an elevated position: they are made of borders of several shrubs and sub-shrubs of various colours, fashioned in different manners, as compartments, foliage, embroideries (passements), moresques, arabesques, grotesques, guilloches, rosettes, sunbursts (gloires), escutcheons, coats-of-arms, monograms and emblems (devises).

By the 1630s, elaborate parterres de broderie appeared at Wilton House in Wilton, England, that were so magnificent that they were engraved, which engraving is the only remaining trace of them. "Parterres de pelouse" or "parterres de gazon" denominate cutwork parterres of low growing herbs (e.g., camomile) as much as closely scythed turf grass. The separation of plant beds of a parterre is denominated an "alley of compartiment".^{[citation needed]}