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André Mollet (died before 16 June 1665) was a Frenchgarden designer, the son ofClaude Mollet—gardener to three French kings—and the grandson of Jacques Mollet, gardener at thechâteau d'Anet, where Italianformal gardening was introduced to France.
André Mollet became royal gardener toQueen Christina inStockholm. His lasting record is his handsomely-printed folio,Le Jardin de plaisir ("The Pleasure Garden")[1], Stockholm 1651, which he illustrated with meticulouscopperplate 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 ofparterres, 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 andfountains, parterres,bosquets andallées.
Mollet was summoned to England in the 1620s to lay out gardens forCharles I of England andHenrietta Maria atSt James's Palace, and he later published his design for the parterres of the privy garden in hisLe jardin de plaisir.[1] Mollet was perhaps the designer of parterres atWilton House.[2] Henrietta Maria was Mollet's main patron, and she sent him back to France to her motherMarie de' Medici with a request for fruit trees and flowers.[3]
By 1633 he was in the service ofPrince Frederick Henry of Orange, for whom he laid outparterres en broderie that included thelion rampant of the prince's coat-of-arms, in turf and clippedboxwood, set in colored gravels atHuis Honselaarsdijk, and at the prince's other main residence,Huis ter Nieuwburg nearRijswijk.
Mollet returned to France in 1635, but he was back in England by 1642, when he was designing gardens forQueen Henrietta-Maria atWimbledon Palace. The house and gardens were described in a survey made in November 1649.[4] His work included the Orange Garden, divided into four knots with an Orange House.[5] A richly decorated room with a tiled floor "below stairs" in the service quarters of the main house, known as the "lower Spanish room", was used by the gardeners to plant orange and pomegranate trees in boxes.[6]
Mollet presumably returned to France after the outbreak of theEnglish Civil War later that year, and dropped from sight. In the autumn of 1646, a Swedish delegation arrived in Paris, led by Christina's favourite, the connoisseurMagnus Gabriel De la Gardie, who was so pleased with recent French developments in the art of gardens that he engaged Mollet for the queen on the spot. Mollet took on two assistants and provided himself with orange and lemon trees andpomegranates, withmyrtle,laurel trees andSpanish jasmine,[7] all of which were tender and destined for anorangerie. He also procuredtulip bulbs andranunculus roots. Then there was a frustrating delay of a full season before the official confirmation arrived.
Mollet's stay in Sweden lasted five years, during which he introduced to Sweden the Frenchparterres en broderie patterned likeBaroque textiles. He modernized the existing gardens linked to theroyal palace in Stockholm and laid out a new garden in the outskirts of Stockholm on the site of a former hop-garden, theHumlegården. The introduction of a Baroque garden style in Sweden dates to this decade, with the encouragement of progressiveFrancophile architects likeNicodemus Tessin the Elder andJean de la Vallée, with whom Mollet had worked in Holland, together with the eager commissions from Swedish nobles that Mollet received. The results are documented inErik Dahlbergh's topographicalSuecia antiqua et hodierna. Though Mollet left Sweden in 1653, his sonJean Mollet remained in Sweden for the rest of his life, and Médard Gue, one of André Mollet's original French assistants, assumed an independent role in Swedish gardening.
Soon Mollet was in London, whence he received a passport to travel abroad once more in 1653. With theEnglish Restoration in 1660, conditions for ambitious garden-building were once more propitious, and Mollet was listed as a royal gardener, gardener-in-chief forSt. James's Park. An English edition ofLe Jardin de plaisir appeared in London in 1670, asThe Pleasure Garden.
Mollet's brother, the younger Claude Mollet, was passed over in favour ofAndré Le Nôtre as chief gardener at thePalace of the Tuileries, in 1649.
Mollet's French predecessors in the art of gardening:
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