PARIS, IN THE SPRING...

One emerges from a shadowy, cool underground passage and onto a narrow garden path. Through patches of pretty flowers, and beyond a wall of giant green leaves, lies a lake; a perfect, tranquil lake, scattered with blossoming water lilies and shaded by the vibrant, yet graceful branches of weeping willow.

 

 

Monet’s garden at Giverny

 Monet’s garden at Giverny – his home from 1883 until his death in 1926 - seems almost as if it is a realisation of his famous paintings, not simply the place which inspired him to create some of his most priceless work.

There are two parts to the garden – a flower garden, called Clos Normand, in the front near the house, and a Japanese inspired water garden on the other side of the road.

When Monet first arrived in Giverny with his wife Alice, the house they rented – a long, low pink building with roughcast walls – sat in two and a half acres of scrubby orchard and garden. Beyond the garden lay waterlogged meadows, full of willows and poplar trees, and poppy fields out in the distance, as far as the eye could see. It was a far cry from the wonderland that exists today.

Monet didn’t like organised gardens; he grouped together flowers according to their colours, and then let them grow wild.

Today, Monet’s house is visited by over 500,000 people, for the seven months that it is open to the public each year. Its picaresque pink house, and garden full of purple pansies, tulips and rhododendrons, is truly beautiful. Inside his former residence, Monet’s walls are adorned with ravishing Japanese paintings, many by Hiroshige and Kurosawa. Each room is decorated in a different colour – a fuchsia bedroom, a canary yellow dining room and a blue kitchen, the shiny copper pots and pans lined neatly along a shelf.

But while the house, with its pretty garden path, and its chicken coop, are completely charming, it is the enchanting garden that surrounds the lake, which is truly wondrous. It is easy to imagine Monet sitting here, his easel and canvases set up in front of him; as one sits under the shade of the willows, glancing up to look out over the lake at the water lilies, the view is no less astounding than one of Monet’s paintings. It is a work of art in itself.