1613-1700
At the opening of the eighteenth century, the dominant force in landscape design was Le Notre, chief garden designer for Louis XIV at Versaille. The most popular garden designs of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century were the French, Italian, and Dutch formal gardens executed to exhibit bilateral symmetry, and no one surpassed Le Notre in his realization of this rigid style.
In this garden style, the part of the garden closest to the palace or house was handled architecturally, like another room-extension of the house proper. The garden consisted of a perfectly regular series of geometrical compartments formed by closely clipped shrubs and trees and straight gravel walks, stone paths, terraces, and steps. Often the compartments were parterres de broderie (plots resembling embroidery) carpeted with low evergreens (often box), flowers (actually rare until the nineteenth century), colored earth, brick dust, coal dust, white and yellow sand, etc. In the largest gardens, rigid geometry was imposed as far as the eye could see. Garden walks extended and radiated in geometrical patterns, along with canals and avenues of trees. Fountains, statues, mazes, and small woods and groves were all arranged symmetrically with reference to one central axis extending from the exact center of the house.
The overriding impression of such gardens is of man's tyranny over nature--perfectly suitable for Louis XIV and other European monarchs.
The masterpiece of this style of gardening was Versaille as laid out for Louis XIV by Andre L Notre. Versaille became the model for princely gardens throughout Europe, and this includes the garden laid out for William III in front of Wren's new east front of Hampton Court Palace. The principal gardener for Hampton Court was Henry Wise (1653-1738)
Here are some pictures of Versaille and other formal gardens of the period.