Was one of the "twigs" you snipped off, "parc" with the meaning "playpen"?

I never connected "parquet" and "parc" and don't know why the word "parquet" acquired a judicial meaning, but it is possible that originally the wooden "parquet" did not cover a floor wall-to-wall but only a smaller area - somewhat like the smallish wooden dance floors in some nightclubs. So back to the Petit Robert, which basically agrees about "parquet" and adds precisions (I paraphrase):

1) "parquet" (a diminutive form of "parc") = "espace délimité" - an area which is defined (here, by a distinct type of flooring) and possibly confined (by some kind of barrier); more specifically: (1366) an area of a court of justice where judges and lawyers assembled, and later (1549) a room or area reserved for members of the prosecutor's office, hence also the group of magistrates so involved;
2) (concrete technical meanings applying to a type of wooden floor or a supporting platform in a boiler room).

So the judicial meaning has a derivation similar to the English "bar" referring to all the barristers or lawyers admitted to practice in a particular jurisdiction, which in turn comes from the "bar" or railing that encloses the area where the a court's business is transacted -- same as the 1366 "parquet" citation above.

So how come I "park" my car?

Probably because before it became customary to leave one's car on the street, the first cars (then very expensive) were "parked" in a garage or other enclosure.

The French word for "bar" in a judicial sense is "le barreau", designating the barristers ("avocats au barreau"), while "le parquet" means the prosecutors.

Parquet is a term I came across when translating some documents from DR Congo. I assume it's moved into the wider reaches of Francophony.

Michael Pearce's splendid 'Mamur Zapt' series about a Welshman serving as the secret police chief in early 20th century Cairo) regularly mentions the Parquet. The British ran the police and the army, while the French organised the judiciar.

I did check out parque of Valery's La Jeune Parque (= one of the Latin Fates, e.g. Nona, Decima, and Morta)and it comes from the Latin Parcae. Too bad -- what a fun derivation that would have been.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parcae),and it come

Another derivative of "park" is the verb "parquer", as in "Les Indiens sont encore parqués dans les réserves" (a sentence one comes across in French descriptions of North America). This does not mean that hey are "parked" together with their cars but stuck in reservations like cattle in pens.

Oh man! That means there's an ancient German cognate: Pferch, a rather obsolete word denoting some kind of fenced area for livestock. Zusammengepfercht means "squeezed together like sardines".

Still, this doesn't mean it's not a loan from Vulgar Latin into Proto-West Germanic or something. The High German consonant shift happened late enough, and the vowel steamrollering (all vowels became e or disappeared, unless they escaped) came even later.

David, that is very interesting. For both form and meaning I agree with you that Pferch could be a loan from Latin parc-us. Are you in a position to follow up the suggestion through other sources? I would be interested to know more about it.