The Travelling Master Gardener: Monet’s Gardens at Giverny

By Chris Durlak

My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.

—Claude Monet

Long considered the father of French Impressionism, Claude Monet (1840–1926) was also an exceptionally creative and ambitious gardener. After years living and painting in various regions of outside of Paris and elsewhere, Monet and his family settled in Giverny, a town approximately fifty miles from Paris, in 1883. He cleared the land and filled it with ornamental and fruit trees and flowers of all kinds. This first of his two gardens is called the Clos Normand.To walk through the Clos Normand is to feel you are walking into a painting. The flower beds are divided into clumps of various heights to create volume. Climbing roses, long-stemmed hollyhocks, and annuals mingle with ornamental trees. Monet also mixed “simple flowers” (perhaps like our natives?) such as daisies and poppies with rare roses. He liked to arrange flowers according to color schemes, then let them grow freely. Later in life he pursued rare flowers to include in his garden and exchanged plants with friends. The gardens were designed to evolve seasonally, so, for example, at the end of summer, nasturtiums are abundant.Ten years after moving to Giverny, Monet purchased some neighboring land traversed by a small brook, from the river Epte, a tributary of the Seine. Here, inspired by the Japanese prints he collected, he began to construct his water garden. As it grew to its present size, the garden developed asymmetrical curves and lines. At one end Monet had a local craftsman build the arched bridge seen in many of his paintings. This garden itself became the inspiration for some of Monet’s most famous works, those of water lilies, which he would paint for nearly thirty years. As he meditated in the garden and observed reflections and misty clouds above the pond, he produced paintings that seem almost dreamlike in composition.The series depicting water lilies was one of his last, and these paintingsremain among his most beloved works. Monet continued to paint almost to his death, in 1926, though his vision was failing due to cataracts.The house and gardens at Giverny deteriorated after Monet’s death and World War II, but through the efforts of a variety of donors and supporters, including many Americans, they were restored, over the course of more than a decade, and since 1980 have been open to the public. As Master Gardeners, we are interested in the beauty and outcome of projects to which we have contributed; a visit to Monet’s gardens reinforces that he, too, was influenced by, and appreciative of, a beautiful environment. His private world as well as his art were reflective of his love of the natural world.References:Encyclopaedia Britannica, Claude MonetGivernet,Giverny Monet’s Garden