The Parterre du Midi lies on the south side of the palace, directly below the Queen's Apartment, and is the most colourful of the formal gardens. It is planted with elaborate embroidery patterns in coloured gravel and low box hedges, with seasonal flowers filling in the designs — a style called broderie, as if the ground were embroidered fabric.
The parterre was designed by André Le Nôtre in the 1660s and has been maintained in essentially the same style ever since, with the plantings renewed each season. It faces south, gets the best light, and was the garden Marie Antoinette could see from her bedroom window. The contrast between the delicate decoration here and the massive stone of the palace behind it is characteristic of the Versailles approach: extreme formality made to appear effortless.
Below the Parterre du Midi, a large staircase (the Cent-Marches, the Hundred Steps) descends to the Orangerie on one side and to the Pièce d'Eau des Suisses — a large lake dug by the Swiss Guards — on the other. Walking down gives a good sense of how much earth was moved to create these terraced gardens on what was originally a sloping hillside.