In the soft light of September, water lilies open in the afternoon. They need all the morning to decide it’s warm enough.
Flowers are tall, filling the beds with masses of vegetation and colors. Dahlias, sages, gauras, nicotianas, balsams are at their best, as well as the giant yellow helianthus. Asters will start soon.
Early June, masses of poppies flower in Monet’s gardens, under the majestic arches covered with roses. Large pink, purple or mauve papaver somniferum are combined with wild looking scarlet poppies. Claude Monet loved and painted both.
It’s a long awaited show. Poppy seeds are scattered in the flower beds and grow on site among spring flowers. Late May, the first buds open at last, offering their transluscent petals to the morning sunbeams. One or two weeks later, an overwhelming wave of poppies invades the gardens. They are striking as a whole, and adorable seen close up, with their little heads surrounded by crumpled petals.
At poppies time, bees are in heaven, and so are we.
Visitors are back in Monet’s gardens in Giverny, enjoying the first flowers of the season: daffodils, tulips, pansies, hyacinths, fritillaries… Trees blossom in pink and white. The first water lily pads are appearing on the pool.
In the nearby Musee des Impressionnismes Giverny (MDIG) the current exhibition is called ‘The Children of Impressionism’. It is packed with works by Renoir, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, Boudin… full of fatherly or motherly tenderness. The exhibition will last up to July 2, 2023. Enjoy!
Monet’s gardens at Giverny are now closed until 1st April 2023, but the gardeners are still very busy preparing the flower show of next year. The Grande Allee has already lost its carpet of nasturtiums, its beds of dahlias, asters and sages. It will soon be replanted with spring bulbs, pansies and wallflowers.
On the left side of the house, the garden of Claude Monet ends in a cul-de-sac. Protected by a high wall, pink roses thrive there. If you visit Giverny, don’t miss this corner of the flower garden, it is the perfect time of year to see – and smell! – roses.
April is a very colorful month at Giverny, thank to thousands and thousands of tulips, underplanted with pansies, wallflowers and forget-me-not.
Monet combined short flower beds and very long ones, inspired by the colorful stripes of the tulipfields that he had seen in Holland.
While trees are changing colors from green to shades of brown and yellow, flowers offer in October fire works of bright and beautiful tones. In Monet’s gardens at Giverny, asters of all kinds steal the show, enhanced by tall yellow helianthus and amazing dahlias. Sages are at their best.
Anyway, after closing day, in November, the gardeners won’t spare any of these beauties. They will rush to clean up the flower beds and plant spring bulbs before it gets cold.
In the impressionist garden of Claude Monet at Giverny, each petal is like some paint on the canvas.
The blue tibouchina is at its best in September. It is grown in a planter as it must be kept in the greenhouse over the winter.
Monet’s garden is a painter’s garden. What matters are colors and light, the subtle and ever changing combination of colors in the light. In this upper corner of the flower garden at Giverny, the gardeners associate poppies of rich or soft pink with a blue clematis and purple roses. The little blue dots are corn flowers.
At the top of his flower garden, in the upper left corner, Monet built a studio in 1899. Aged 58, he was now famous, recognized as a master, and rich enough to turn his building dreams into reality.
A double row of lime-trees (tilia) linked this studio with the garden. Monet and his family loved to stay in their shade on warm summer days for a lunch in the open air.
In their times, the ground was sanded. Nowadays, a tempting lawn covers this cool area, but just for the pleasure of the eyes: it is not allowed to step, not to speak about lying on it.
In the background, against the studio wall, Monet installed an aviary where the children kept wounded birds that they tried to rescue.
Peonies belonged to Monet’s most cherished flowers. Rare species were sent to him from Asia, needless to say that the painter was thrilled and took great care of them.
Their beautiful colors and fragile looking petals have still many admirers. The giant size of the flowers, their light scent and ornamental foliage make them must have in a garden.
At Giverny, they are combined with annuals and spring bulbs. The gardeners experiment new harmonies every year, which is a good tip to avoid monotony in your on garden. If by any chance you are not enthusiastic about the result, it doesn’t matter much because bulbs can be changed next year. And peonies flower for such a short time that the not-so-well-matching effect will not last.
In Claude Monet’s garden, it is all about colors. Petals are used like paint, like brushstrokes, to give the illusion of an impressionist painting in which we can walk.
In October and November, asters are at their best at Giverny, creating masses of little starry flowers. They mate with many other late bloomers such as sages, love lies bleeding, garden chrysanthemums or dahlias of all kind, showing that autumn too is a great season for flowers.
Monet’ house at Giverny, mid-May. Click to enlarge.
Some flower names sound really strange, like foxgloves. These tall and beautiful flowers (also called digitalis) photographed here at the top of the main alley in Claude Monet’s flower garden like the shade of the two old yews. Under the dark branches, they feel at home, as if they had just escaped from a wood. They thrive in the forests of Normandy, wherever the soil is acidic enough.
With their spiky shape they resemble fairy hats, what leads us to the origin of their common name. According to a friend of mine, foxgloves derive from folks gloves, these folks being the fairies, of course. I don’t know if it’s true, but I like this explanation…
The name of Monet and his garden at Giverny evoke specific flowers: water lilies, wisterias, irises in large rows… It rarely brings up images of tulips. The big tulip show of April is a surprise to many visitors.
Tulips in Monet’s times were not yet what they are now, but Monet planted them and painted them, especially on the dining-room doors of his art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. They are so colorful and charming that a painter can only fall under their spell.
10 000 bulbs are planted yearly in Monet’s gardens at Giverny. During the first weeks after the opening, they pop out of the ground, form their thick buds and open all of a sudden at the first ray of sunshine. It is like a canvas suddenly covered by paint, each of them being a brushstroke. It may be the time of year when the feeling of walking in a painting is at its strongest in the flower garden designed by Claude Monet.