Claude Monet’s fantastic garden at Giverny
Why on earth would anyone want to create a flower garden? In 1883, the 279 souls of the village of Giverny were dumbfounded, when the artist, who had been renting a pink-rendered house with grey shutters, Le Pressoir, declared his intention to plant flowers. Because, at the end of the 19th century, right-minded people only planted vegetables and flowers were felt to be entirely… useless!
Indifferent to the sarcasm, Claude Monet set about landscaping his “Clos Normand” flower garden opposite the house he had purchased in 1890. He had a path of iron arches created for climbing roses in a bid to create perspective, which he intended to reproduce on his canvases.
Three years later, after acquiring a further 1,300m² plot of land below the property, he decided to create a “Water Garden”, supplied by a millrace that fed two nearby mills via a brook, the Ru, an arm of the Epte River. This time the locals were aghast, terrified that all these foreign plants (tree peonies, Japanese plum and maple trees, ginkgo biloba, bamboos, water irises and lilies) would poison the water and their livestock.
Deaf to the outcry and inspired by the Japanese prints he collected, Monet had a blue-green Japanese-inspired footbridge built in 1895, to which he added arches that were soon smothered in fragrant wisteria. In 1901, he enlarged the pond after purchasing 3,700 m² of additional land and obtaining authorisation to reroute the “Bras Communal” waterway.
An Impressionist’s Garden
Over 100 years later, this tiny village attracts visitors from all over the world precisely because Claude Monet lived here for 43 years, tirelessly painting masterpieces that today grace the walls of international museums. Giverny is forever synonymous with Monet: poppies growing against spruce, flower-decked facades and an Impressionist Museum, flanked by colour-themed plots of red, white, blue and yellow flowers.
Although Monet’s house is still pink, some 100 years ago, the original faded grey shutters were painted an eye-catching “Monet green”, as was the Japanese bridge. Monet’s son, Michel, who died in 1966, bequeathed the family house to the Academy of Fine Arts and it is now run by a foundation.
Some ten full-time gardeners are employed to keep up with this vibrant garden, a riot of perennial, annual and biennial plants that flower month after month and season after season, all of which require planting, transplanting, seeding and propagating, under the watchful eye of Jean-Marie Avisard, 32 years seniority, who told us a little about the garden: “The weeping willow, copper beech, bamboos and wisterias all date from Monet’s era. The rest of the garden was recreated “after the fashion of” by little dabs of colour.” The garden’s renovation (1977-1980) was heavily inspired by Georges Truffaut’s list published in a horticultural magazine in 1924 and accounts of Princess Matsukata Kuroki who regularly gave Monet seeds.
Jean-Marie Avisard even went to the island of Daikonjima in Japan, where he visited the Yushien nursery specialised in tree peonies from which Monet himself purchased plants. The Water Garden’s lilies continue to come from the Latour-Marliac nursery in Lot-et-Garonne. In 1875, Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac successfully created hybrid yellow, pink, crimson and violet lilies, which had previously only been available in white…
Universality
The rest is History. Monet, who didn’t like the word “nénuphar” (French for water lily), called his water lilies by the Latin word Nymphaea (spelt Nymphéa in French). Each morning, before setting up in front of his easel, the artist-gardener would row himself over to the lilies and dust off the soot projected onto their flowers and leaves by the railroad that ran down the middle of his garden. Nowadays, a road has taken the place of the rail tracks and an underground passageway links both gardens. However, a gardener continues to keep watch over the pond from a boat. As Jean-Marie Avisard explained, “water lilies grow very fast, so we frequently have to prune each individual cluster so that it forms a perfect circle, as in the paintings.”
Monet’s pictorial testament, a set of eight 200m² panels entitled the “Water Lilies”, was donated to the French nation in the wake of the armistice of 1918. To house this monumental work of art, the Orangerie Museum was redesigned by Claude Monet and the architect Camille Lefèvre who created two oval rooms that symbolise infinity. The panels are hung following an east-west orientation that places them in the path of the sun with the natural light entering through the ceiling. Haloed by sunshine or mist, between shadow and light, the Water Lilies are perfectly showcased – exactly like those of Giverny.
