A parterre is a garden laid out to be looked at from a window above, its beds cut into scrolling compartments and edged in low box, read as a pattern rather than as planting. This design takes that plan view directly, so the trellis on the wall is in fact a garden seen from the first floor of a French house of the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
The drawing is fine and open. Line does all the work, with no infill and no shading, so the pattern sits lightly on its ground and never closes a room down the way a heavier trellis can. The scrolls interlock into a continuous framework, which gives a wall a gentle order without imposing a grid on it.
Its usefulness lies in that lightness. It will paper a small room without shrinking it, sit behind furniture and pictures without argument, and run through a hall and up a stair without becoming tiring. The range of colourings takes it from near-neutral to strong, and there is a matching border, printed in reverse, for rooms where the scheme wants finishing at cornice or dado height. The Folie collection it belongs to is built around this kind of light architectural drawing.
