If there was only room on the spaceship to Mars (or whatever planet the people of earth were relocating to) for a thousand paintings then two hundred and fifty would have to be Monet’s waterlily canvases.
Félix Breuil, Monet’s Head Gardener, whose job it was to look after the waterlily pond, worked for Monet for nearly thirty years. For thirty years he watched Monet drawing and painting the trees, the water, the flowers and the waterlilies. Then he retired. You’d think that Félix Breuil would’ve wanted to visit his famous pond again, at least once, but he didn’t. Instead, he went to the Orangery in Paris, where Monet’s giant waterlily paintings, The Nymphéas, the series he gave to the people of France after World War One, are displayed. Such is the powerful pull of these paintings.
It was my love of these waterlily paintings that motivated me to visit Giverny. I wanted to see Monet’s water garden. The garden that Monet created and later painted. Capturing beautiful ephemeral moments. And yet these paintings are about so much more than the play of light on water. They are about love and grief and despair and darkness and a man’s life coming to an end. They are about the death of his wife and his son and friends and war. They are about his deteriorating eyesight. Of not being able to paint. Of not wanting to paint. Of his failing health.
Luckily, Monet was drawn to painting his garden. And, as all gardeners know, gardening and gardens are both great rejuvenators of weary spirits. Monet found what he was looking for in the watery world of his pond.
This is the second part in a two part blog about Monet’s garden in Giverny, which I visited in summer last year.
The Water Garden is separated from the flower garden by a road. An underground passage links the two. Monet bought the land for his Water Garden in 1893. After a lot of trouble with the council he was allowed to divert the River Ru to make his pond. You can see the River Ru in the photo below, really it’s a large stream. Given that it was the middle of a heatwave, July 2018, it’s remarkable there was so much water.
I recognise the shrub with the long brownish leaves, in the photo above. A friend recently gave me one, which she’d grown from a cutting. It’s Persicaria microcephala. It likes to be planted in part-shade. I have to dig up a flax bush in order to make room for my persicaria (no easy matter).
Monet’s pond is oval in shape and has an island at one end of it. You can see Monet’s island in the photo below. It’s the view facing the other way on the little bridge.
The day I visited the Water Garden it was overrun with tourists. I got stuck behind an older American man and his wife. The man was disgusted at the use of so many invasive plants. He kept shaking his head while reciting the names of the outlaws. The bamboo and ivy especially distressed him.
The water garden, both in design and planting, was influenced by the 17th century Japanese gardens depicted in the Japanese woodcuts that Monet collected. His flower garden across the road was laid out geometrically. The colours of the flowers and foliage in combination with one another resembled a fireworks display in slow motion. By contrast the water garden was a green and tranquil space with curves and circles, ovals and lots of shade. The paths were sinuous, the bridges were arched. There were no straight lines. It was a quiet garden and Monet made places for people to pause and contemplate nature.
‘The water garden emphasised foliage. He left poplars and aspens he found and added the now-famous weeping willows. The outer perimeters he planted with azaleas, rhododendrons, hydrangeas and hedges of roses. He filled in the rest with acid-loving plants such as kalmia, spiraea, holly and huge ferns.’ (Monet’s Garden - by Vivian Russell)
Monet planted a bamboo forest on the island (see photo above). It provided shelter from the wind. He placed a bench in an alcove facing the water so that he could study the waterlilies and other plants.
Here, above and below, is the giant copper beech from Monet’s time. He planted Japanese tree peonies all around the tree.
I remember coming out from under the copper beech and walking onto a sort of jetty surrounded by roses. I barely had time to pause and look before a tourist called out, ‘You need to move on and let other people have a turn.’ I pretended I didn’t hear the woman, who wore a name tag and was part of a group. She had one of those sharp imperious voices. I took my time, what was she going to do? Drag me off the jetty? Push me in the water?
Back in Monet’s day the pond had a thin border of grass. I know this from the books I have about Giverny, which have lots of photographs of the garden from Monet’s time. Now the pond edges are densely planted and the grass is gone. Lots of it is fenced off. This has been done to stop tourists from trampling on the plants, which happened a lot, as they tried to take the most perfect photograph of the waterlilies or the bridge.
Here’s an excerpt from the book ‘Monet’s Garden Through the Seasons at Giverny’ by Vivian Russell, 1995. Which, incidentally, is a wonderful history of the garden as well as a diary of the seasonal changes in the garden. The amount of work that the modern day gardeners have to do to keep the garden looking perfect is, well, it’s staggering. It makes me thankful for my small suburban plot to potter away in, in complete privacy.
‘A narrow border of grass framed the pond, and to soften its edges he (Monet) used indigenous plants from the marshes - calthas, trollius, saggitaria, pink and yellow thalictrum, agapanthus, rare species of Japanese lilies, gladioli, petasites with giant round leaves and aquatic plants obtained from a specialist near Lyons, together with almost every species of iris. Pampas grass (Cortaderia selloana) and eulalias (Miscanthus sinensis) added their plumes to the foliage of the irises, and dripping willow branches enhanced the overall effect.’
Monet grew every kind of water lily he could get his hands on. Some where so tender they were grown in his greenhouse. Looking after the pond and waterlilies was a time consuming job.
‘Water lilies like having their feet warm, in other words to be planted near the pond surface. They also like their leaves to be spread out with plenty of room, so the gardener’s job was to keep the clusters of leaves trimmed in circular rafts and, every morning, to clean the pond, remove the algae, dead-head the flowers, remove any dead leaves and rinse the dust off the lily pads before Monet arrived with his easel and parasol.’ (Monet’s Garden by Vivian Russell).
There’s a little green bridge in the photo above. It’s a popular place for tourists to stop and photograph the famous Japanese bridge.
Through the trees, in the photo above, is a glimpse of Monet’s pink and green house.
Roses are clambering up a tree in the photo above.
I think that the white shrub, leaning over the pond, with the white flowers is the shrub rose ‘Nevada’. I wrote about this rose in my series on the old roses at the Bolton Street Cemetery. It’s a very vigorous rose bred by the Spanish rose breeder Pedro Dot. I know from Vivian Russell’s book that this rose grows by the edge of the pond. You can see ‘Nevada’ in the photo above and below.
The big round leafed plants, of which there were many, are petasites.
I’m standing on the small green bridge looking towards Monet’s much painted and photographed large green arched, and wisteria covered, bridge - the Japanese Bridge. You will see it appear in a number of the photos below.
Monet instructed his head gardener to plant lots of different water-loving irises from around the world. The first that were planted were Japanese irises (Iris ensata). He had them planted in naturalistic clumps and allowed them to self seed. Nothing was allowed to be symmetrical in the water garden. Everything had to look as if nature had placed it there, randomly.
This pink astilbe looks very healthy. It’s feathery flowers pick up the pink and copper colours of other plants. It’s supposed to be an easy plant to grow. I have a white variety in my woodland corner. It’s never flowered and its leaves are pathetic. I have the same problem with my 3 thalictrum plants
In the photograph above and in a number below you can see Monet’s original wisteria, still growing. It is supported by a metal frame.
Notice the small green bridge in the photo above. It’s where I stood to take photos of the Japanese Bridge bedecked with tourists.
‘Over the arches, above paths and up trees grew the roses ‘Crimson Rambler’ and the vigorous ‘La Belle Vichysoise’, eight metres, twenty-six feet long, with clusters of small pink flowers, a rose that has disappeared from the catalogues of today but is still grown in the garden.’ (Monet’s Garden by Vivian Russell). I noticed a number of different roses growing in the water garden but you had to look hard to find them.
In the photograph above you’ll see the little jetty where I was accosted by a tourist.
And finally we get to the ‘Japanese Bridge’, weighed down and almost enclosed by wisteria vines. There are four kinds: two white ones called Wisteria floribunda ‘Alba’ and W. sinensis ‘Alba’(Monet’s original plant); and two purple ones called W. floribunda ‘Multijuga’ and W. sinensis. They are pruned in August.
Finally I’m standing on the Japanese bridge after waiting for a big group of people to leave. In one direction are the boats, looking back to where I started. In the other direction is the little green bridge on the far side of the pond.
The boats (above and below) aren’t Monet’s original ones. They’re traditional boats though, used by the gardeners to look after the pond.
There weren’t many flowers left on the wisteria vines, but it didn’t matter. It was a stinking hot day and it was so cool in the shade of the beautiful leaves.
Then it was time to leave. We took the path that lead to the passage under the road. I kept stopping to take photos. My husband, who’d been very patient, waiting for me on the many park benches, wanted to see Monet’s house and get some lunch.
This is the sluice (above and below) that controls the amount of water flowing in and out of the pond. I had to stop and record it with my camera.
And here’s another climbing rose, looking demure compared to the roses in the flower garden. There’s no showing off here.
Here’s the last thing I saw. Like an apparition. A group of cattle, bright sunlit white, grazing in the field behind the water garden.
I tried to imagine Monet in his garden while I walked around it. I tried to imagine him standing exactly in the spots I stood, contemplating the scene before him. There was no doubt in my mind that his boots had stood exactly where my feet stood. But I couldn’t bring him back to life. The garden was his garden but it’d become something else. It was a tourist attraction. The very thing that saved it, irrevocably changed it. It’s still a beautiful garden full of light and shade and foliage and magic. But now I think I understand why Félix Breuil never went back to Giverny.
This blog is a week later than I planned. Life gets in the way. I had to present an oral submission to the Mayor and a handful of Councillors. I’m trying to stop my local council from destroying a small but beautiful piece of forest, close to my house. It took a very long time to write a 5 minute submission that ended up being 7 minutes. In the end I had to cut my submission short. The chairman wouldn’t let me finish. The Mayor who left early, never got to hear it. I doubt it will change anything but when it comes to saving forests and gardens it’s important to try.
My blogs will now be published every 3 weeks. In order to allow time to save forests and weed my garden.