Designing a Monet Garden

Claude Monet was a a French painter, a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature.

Monet's ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to adopt a method of painting the same scene many times in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons.

Monet's House and Gardens

Giverny is essentially a country cottage garden, with loosely planted menage of many old-fashioned flowers favored in the nineteenth century.

Monet's garden is a good example of cottage style, with closely planted old-fashioned flowers spilling over each other, Cut Flowers Garden design, and the traditional Japanese Garden.

At the beginning of May 1883 Monet and his large family rented a house and gardens in Giverny from a local landowner. The house was situated near the main road, between the towns of Vernon and Gasny at Giverny. There was a barn that doubled as a painting studio, orchards and a small garden.

The house was close enough to the local schools for his children to attend, and the surrounding landscape offered many suitable motifs for Monet's work. The family worked and built up the gardens, and Monet's fortunes began to change for the better By November 1890, Monet was prosperous enough to buy the house, the surrounding buildings and the land for his gardens. During the 1890s, Monet built a greenhouse and a second studio, a spacious building, well lit with skylights.

Eventually the original two acres expanded to five acres planted with the now famous gardens.

The original place had taken on a transformation. and Monet directed the renovation of the house, retaining its pink-painted walls. Colors from the painter's own palette were used for the interior green for the doors and shutters, yellow in the dining room, complete with Japanese Prints from the 18th and 19th centuries, and blue for the kitchen. Monet's home houses a collection of more than 200 Japanese ukiyo-e prints from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Monet had the nearby river Epte partially diverted for the gardens, and hired up to seven gardeners to tend to it. Monet gained much of his inspiration from his gardens, and believed it was important to surround himself with nature and paint outdoors.

At first a farmhouse surrounded by an orchard, Monet tore out all but a few of the original fruit trees. The formal aspect of the allée leading to the house was retained, Monet removed the spruce trees and replaced them with the now widely-recognized metal arches, covered in roses and clematis




The Gardens are divided into two distinctive parts, which have been restored according to Monet's own specifications. In 1893, the artist managed to buy the meadow located across the road from his home. In this meadow he dug a pond and built his Oriental garden with its brightly painted Japanese bridge. White water lilies local to France were planted along with imported cultivars from South America and Egypt, resulting in a range of colours including yellow, blue and white lilies that turned pink with age. In 1893 Monet acquired a vacant piece of land across the road from the Clos-Normand, which he then transformed into a water garden by diverting water from the stream Ru, an arm of the Epte river. That garden became famous during his lifetime with his series of monumental paintings of its water lilies, the Nymphéas. The water garden is marked by Monet's fascination for Japan, with its green Japanese bridge and oriental plants. The now famous water lilies were meticulously tended by a gardener employed for that sole purpose.