I promised you a blog all about my emerging sink gardens. I’ve made three so far - sinks that is. And I’ve cleared the courtyard in readiness for them. As a part-time gardener I’m rich on ideas and poor on time. I got sick. That’s the downside to teaching 5 and 6 year olds. They’re so full of optimism, bursting with energy and they’e always coming down with things. I succumbed to some no-name virus that stopped me getting on with my sink gardens. So you get Monet instead.

Here in Wellington the weather is closing in. It’s raining or else it’s blowing a gale and either way the skies are low enough to bump your head on. So it’s nice to escape to a garden in France, remembering a day that was still and stinking hot. A garden in Giverny.

Giverny is a small village in Normandy where Monet lived, painted and gardened for 46 years. I visited the house and garden in early July last year.

The entrance to Monet’s garden at Giverny.

I travelled to Monet’s garden with my husband who kindly accompanied me on my pilgrimage. I say kindly, because while he likes beautiful gardens he likes them a lot less in melting asphalt type temperatures, in the company of hundreds of tourists, some who were genuine garden lovers, but most of whom were genuine Top Tenners. That’s to say, people who visit a place because it’s one of the top ten places to visit when you visit one of the top ten cities in the world. There was many a selfie-stick and walking stick to dodge. Wisely, we left our son in Paris to in the company of good friends. He hates gardens.

As soon as I stepped into Monet’s garden I knew that the tedious journey to get there (an hour on a train from Paris to Vernon, 20 minutes queuing for a transfer to Giverny, 20 minutes in the overcrowded trailer of a mock steam train driven on the road, 10 minutes walking to Monet’s garden) had been worth it. Sure the garden was overrun with tourists, but the garden seemed to absorb them, and anyway, most of them had stepped onto that invisible tourist travelator. I let them pass. Giverny was mesmerising. It’s a genuine Impressionist Garden. That is to say a garden created by an impressionist painter to relax and paint in. A garden that reflected Monet’s interest in naturalistic planting (late 1880s French style) and reflected his life long interest in experimenting with light and colour. Monet used plants in the same way he used paint. Giverny is a living Monet painting.

Impressionist painters often painted outside. They were inspired by nature and tried to capture the ephemeral quality of light and the way it changed form and colour. Up until that time, mainstream painters painted in studios and they painted pictures that looked like photographs. Impressionist painters invented new ways to apply paint and use colour. They used brushstrokes that mimicked the way light interacted with the landscape, they moved paint around their canvas in dashes, dots, patches, smears, swirls and sinuous snaking lines. They applied paint thickly, so thick it created shadows; they applied paint thinly, so thin you could see the underlying canvas. It was this contrast of texture, brushstrokes and colours that made their paintings so alive with movement.

Monet placed his colours side by side on his canvas. If he wanted to make the colour orange he’d lay dashes of red paint beside dashes of yellow paint (red and yellow when mixed together make orange). The viewer would mix the colours optically. The colours and textures on Monet’s paintings changed depending on how close or distant a person stood from the canvas. And so it is with Monet’s garden. The colours are laid out with contrasting colours or harmonising colours side by side: orange poppies beside blue pansies or white daisies with white nicotiana. It’s the garden visitors who blend the colours with their eyes. It’s a garden, just like one of Monet’s paintings, that has been designed to be viewed from a distance or close-up.

Let’s go for a walk.

It’s late morning, there are clouds that diffuse the sun and make the colours glow.

The garden is divided into two separate sections: the rectangular garden in front of the house and a water garden, which is separated from the main garden by a road (I’l write about that in my next blog). The main garden is divided into lots of smaller rectangular areas. Its a garden of straight lines and paths, all softened by the dense planting. Some of the areas are lawns, like the photo above, but most are long narrow flower beds with paths on either side.

The garden is more or less flat and sits on the fertile river plain of the River Epte. When Monet moved in in 1883 it was a disused cider farm, called Le Pressoir. The soil is alkaline.

The lawn in the picture above is bordered by cordon-trained apple trees.

All gardens change over time and while this garden is similar to Monet’s garden it isn’t the same. Many of the plants in his garden disappeared over time. He died in 1926 and it slowly went downhill from then. Restoration of the garden only began in 1976 thanks to the donations of lots of benevolent Americans. It was opened to the public in 1980.

The Giverny gardeners have tried, where practicable, to use the same plant varieties that Monet used. Over time many of these plant varieties have disappeared. But two thing haven’t changed and that’s the colours and the planting schemes. The gardeners have tried to stay true to Monet. The layout of the garden is the same as in Monet’s day, only it’s more formal. Back in Monet’s time his garden was wilder and more naturalistic in style, especially the borders away from the house. The island beds by the house were always planted with geraniums and standard roses.

Giverny has thousands of visitors a year so there’ve been compromises and constraints to keep the garden in pristine condition. Paths have had to be widened and designed for heavy foot traffic. Unfortunately when the paths were laid in the 70s the wrong material was used, making the soil even more alkaline - iron has to be regularly added to the water. Some sections of the garden, like the Grande Allée, have been closed to visitors and can only be glimpsed from behind a chain. And to keep the tourists happy from spring to autumn the gardeners have used many modern plant varieties with bigger longer lasting blooms. The show must go on, for that’s exactly what it’s become - a marvellous piece of performance art.

A Cotinus coggygria tree provides height and a haze of flowers in a flat landscape. It’s a very painterly scene. The cotinus is a shimmering splodge of peach that contrasts with the dashes of scarlet and magenta flowers, and the broiling sky in thick smudges of grey and pale cerulean blue.

The two beds above are some of the monochromatic perennial flower beds - one being red and the other white. Monet like to use smaller plants to edge his borders.

Monet had lots of favourite flowers. He especially liked ones that resembled wild flowers. He didn’t like double flowers or variegated foliage or anything that looked over-bred. He also loved lots of the plants that were popular in French gardens at that time, such as: Hybrid Tea roses, dahlias, gladioli and geraniums.

Monet who was a fan of the naturalistic school of planting hated ‘rocks with cascades, giant cement mushrooms, columns, statues, topiary, Victorian bedding in floral mosaic patterns planted with pansies, daisies, heliotrope and ageratum.’

He also hated cannas, heliotrope, veronicas, French marigolds, sweet Williams and everlasting helichrysums - all of which were banned from his garden. I feel the same way about alyssum.

I like these mushroom structures used to grow the roses up and over. They’ve been turned into trees. I like the thickly planted contrasting coloured flowers under the roses.

Look! a Fatsia japonica!

Using painted steel reinforcing rods as dahlia stakes came about in 1976 as a way of saving money when the garden was being restored. But it’s a tradition that’s continued and I like it. Gertrude Jekyll would’ve disapproved. She believed that garden stakes should be invisible.

Here’s the Grande Allée. The most famous and most photographed part of the garden (first equal with Monet’s bridge). Roses are trained over the arches. In autumn the path is covered in nasturtiums.

We’re now entering the area where there are 15 monochromatic and polychromatic flowerbeds. It’s midday now and the sun is high in the sky bleaching all the colours. France, like much of Europe is experiencing a heat wave. You wouldn’t know it here in Monet’s garden.

The boundary wall in the photo above is planted with pyracantha and climbing roses.

The tree with the pink flowers, seen in many of the photos, is the Persian silk tree, Albizia julibrissin. It was introduced to Europe in the mid- 18th century by an Italian called Filippo degli Albizzi. It comes from Southwestern and Eastern Asia. It belongs to the Fabaceae family along with clover and sweet peas. It is cold and drought tolerant and is considered a pest plant in some countries.

I like the way that the plastic chains, metal arches, stakes and rose frames are painted a similar green as the shutters and doors on Monet’s house. A feature is made of these workaday objects.

In the photo above you can see the entrance to the plant propagation area. There are two greenhouses and 6 warm frames. Below is a better view of the warm frames.

Here are two photos, above and below, of the pleached lime trees. Most of them date back to Monet’s time.

Here’s the first proper view of the house. One of its former owners painted it pink to remind him of his hometown Guadalupe. I like these island beds with their pink and red geraniums, standard Hybrid Teas and climbing roses - planted just as Monet had them (except he used bamboo stakes instead of metal frames for his climbing roses).

Above and below are two views of Monet’s studio window. One looking in and the other looking out.

There are two yew trees in the top right of the photo above. These are the only remaining trees along the Grande Allée. It used to be lined with cypresses and spruces when Monet first bought the property. His wife loved the trees but he didn’t. Bit by bit they came down.

The gardeners (photos above) stand in the shadow of the two old yew trees. They’re getting ready to plant out some flowers in the Grande Allée.

Here’s the view from Monet’s bedroom.

The yellow rose growing under Monet’s bedroom window is said to be his favourite rose, ‘Mermaid’. Mermaid is a scented, repeat-flowering climbing rose bred in 1918, a cross of Rosa Bracteata and a Double Yellow Tea Rose. It can flower from spring to autumn and has the ability to climb up to 9m, but doesn’t mind a heavy prune. It has vicious thorns (cheaper than a burglar alarm) and is a good rose to cover an ugly shed or climb up a tree.

We exited the garden through the gift shop, which used to be the studio where Monet painted his waterlily pictures. And, like every other tourist I bought a souvenir. Something completely useless made somewhere else and no doubt contributing to global warming. I was hoping to hang onto the magic of the garden. I would’ve preferred a plant or a packet of seeds but I’d be locked up in jail if I tried to get either of those things into New Zealand. So I settled for this.

My next blog will be about Monet’s water garden at Giverny.