In the French formal garden, a bosquet is a formal plantation of trees in a wide variety of forms, some open at the bottom and others not. At a minimum a bosquet can be five trees of identical species planted as a quincunx, or set in strict regularity as to rank and file, so that the trunks line up as one passes along either face. In large gardens they were dense artificial woodland, often covering large areas, with tall hedges on the outside and other trees inside the hedges. Symbolic of order in a humanized and tamed gardens of the French Renaissance and Baroque French formal gardens, the bosquet is an analogue of the orderly orchard, an amenity that has been intimately associated with pleasure gardening from the earliest Persian gardens of the Achaemenid Empire.
A bosquet in the gardens of Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. It is shaped like a fan and therefore is called "der Fächer" in German. The gardens were designed mainly during the reign of Maria Theresa (1740 - 1780) and have been preserved together with the buildings as a remarkable Baroque ensemble, which was catalogued as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1996.
The full French formal style; an alley or walk in a bosquet in the Gardens of Versailles.
Bosquet in the Promenade Saint-Antoine, Geneva
Bosquet of the Branicki Palace in Białystok, 1750s
The French formal garden, also called the jardin à la française, is a style of "landscape" garden based on symmetry and the principle of imposing order on nature. Its epitome is generally considered to be the Gardens of Versailles designed during the 17th century by the landscape architect André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV and widely copied by other European courts.
Gardens of Versailles
The Bassin d'Apollon in the Gardens of Versailles
Parterre of the Versailles Orangerie
Gardens of the Grand Trianon at the Palace of Versailles