The Claude Monet's Garden as the seasons go by

The transformation of the neglected orchard and potager into a garden a dazzling profusion of floxers began almost the minute Monet moved into his new home. Initially he did the planting and tending himself, with some help from the children but by 189() lie was wealthy enough to employ six gardeners and to have greenhouses built.

Initially he did the planting and tending himself, with some help from the children but by 189() lie was wealthy enough to employ six gardeners and to have greenhouses built.

Writing in 1901, the critic Arsène Alexander noted ’... the garden is Monet’ and went on to describe the planting : if you dig up the carrots and lettuces (in a market garden) and instead plant flowers, but just as close together, you will get wonderful results, providing you are capable of playing on the floral calendar as you would on a piano keyboard, and providing you are an expert with colours. It is this profusion, this sense of flowers crowded together, that gives the garden its whole character ...

In 1893 Monet bought a further strip of land beyond the railway line at the end of the flower garden. It bordered the river Ru, a tributary of the Epte, and ln 1901 he obtained permission from the local authority to divert the stream so that lie could enlarge an existing pond and so create an extensive water garden.

He surrounded it with weeping and poplars, rare lilies, azaleas rhododendrons and roses, and built a little green Japanese bridge across the pond, around which lie would train white and mauve wisterias.

Alexandre described this stretch of water as ’a masterpiece by some goldsmith who has blended together alloys of the most magic metals’. Monet spent hours here seated on his bench by the waterlily pond, contemplating the play of light on water, and it inspired his final and most ambitious project, the Grandes Décorations des Nymphéas which lie was completing ln the months before his death ln 1926. The waterlily panels which were bequeathed to the French nation, remain the most eloquent testimony to Giverny and its creator

Photograps © Jean-Michel Peers page 1 to 6
From Monet’sHouse an Impressionist Interior © Heide Michels
Photographs © Philippe Chauveau page 7