Monet's Garden, Giverny, France

I once read that artists who sketch or paint in public often find that people who glance over their shoulder spend more time looking at the subject than the work of the artist. It seems that we are first interested in what inspires the artistic eye, and only afterwards by the results of that inspiration. Maybe that’s what the long line of visitors outside Monet’s Giverny garden hope to get – a glimpse over the master’s shoulder at the source of his inspiration.


Monet’s garden is one that most of us already feel some sense of familiarity with, thanks to his many paintings of it. In real life, it’s almost exactly as I imagined it to be. The first section close to the house is a very domestic, traditional flower garden, divided into simple rectangular beds devoted to flowers. Monet spent a lot of time devising colour and plant combinations, and fortunately left behind a lot of material – notes, photographs (mainly by visitors), and of course paintings – that can be used to plan and maintain today’s gardens. And even though ‘traditional’ comes to mind when describing this area, the design and plantings are certainly unique – even a small corner photographed can instantly be recognized as Monet’s garden. The house itself is also really lovely by the way, and features his large painting studio, a cozy kitchen and yellow dining room, and a huge collection of Japanese prints that fill every square inch of wall.




But across the road (now reached through an underground tunnel), is the magical spot everyone is most keen to see – the lily pond. And yes, it is just as magical and inspiring as one could hope. It’s an enclosed garden, completely surrounded by an envelope of tall trees. It’s hard to tell exactly where Monet’s paintings of it, lodged somewhere in our subconscious, stop and where reality begins. The light shimmers off the water and willows, the colours blend into each other, and everywhere you turn you can imagine a perfect little tableau. We have a ridiculous number of photographs from this garden because almost every angle seemed perfect.



Monet described his two main occupations as painting and gardening, and it’s hard to tell which came first. He started gardening when young and said that flowers inspired him to become a painter. As an adult, he created gardens at all the properties he rented, but most extensively at Giverny because he was able to buy it. He used his gardens as subjects for paintings, and used his paintings to learn which compositions and colour combinations work best. In the end, he declared the garden as “his most beautiful work of art”, a gratifying thing for us gardeners.

"Where is the garden?"

A few weeks ago (actually, I now realize that it was a few months ago... ), I was reading Thomas Rainer's series of posts on his blog Grounded Design on the use of native plants, and the related story of the native gardens at New York Botanical Gardens. It seems that the NYBG is currently transforming these areas because they failed to impress visitors. The originals were designed to illustrate various native habitats, but their small size made them difficult to maintain, and in the end the “general public was left wondering exactly where the ‘garden’ was”. In response, the gardens are now being transformed into new designed landscapes with bolder plants and a more refined design, which should hopefully prove more popular. Rainer goes on to say that if native plants are to be successfully adopted into mainstream gardening, they must meet our criteria for “ornamentally beautiful” plants, meaning that they should be “pretty” and “showy”. The public isn’t going to fall for a patch of rough grass with a handful of hidden orchids. Also, we should be using these plants in “designed landscapes”, rather than confining them to designs that usually try to mimic some natural habitat. And that got me thinking… are we just trying to change the varieties of plants we use, or are we trying to change the types of gardens we create?

First, I should say that I fully understand the problem Rainer describes. Maybe it’s fair to say that the average person enjoys bright colours and “knock-your-socks-off bloomy” borders much more than something they could encounter on the side of the road. We are attracted to flowers and colours, so perhaps we should just acknowledge this as a universal starting principle in all design. I also agree that just because we’re trying to use more native plants doesn’t mean we should always try to mimic a certain habitat.

But at the same time, I can’t help feeling that there should be more to this than just trying to find sufficiently dramatic native plants. We seem to be on a bit of a movement for more ecologically sensitive gardening. Maybe this movement could be about more than just exchanging one colourful plant for another; maybe we can change our whole perception of what a garden is?

This brings to mind two rather well known garden makers: Piet Oudolf, the internationally recognized guru, and Henk Gerritsen, the lesser-known wild child. Oudolf has become a huge influence in the landscaping world by using new plants in new ways. He has helped change our perceptions of gardens, and I, like so many others, admire and enjoy Oudolf’s work a lot. At the same time, I would argue that he is still playing by the rules of the game. People don’t wonder if Oudolf’s gardens are gardens – they clearly are, but they are new and different. His strength is that he has found a balance between managing our desires for an aesthetically organized and fairly colourful and ‘showy’ garden, while still pushing the envelope.




Henk Gerritsen was a colleague of Oudolf’s, and they collaborated and shared ideas on many new concepts. However, Gerritsen’s garden ideas were far more wild and pushed the concept of a garden further than Oudolf. I’m by no means an expert on his philosophy (especially as I haven’t even read his book -can’t find a reasonably priced copy anywhere!), but I have been to his garden. When I was there, my first impression was that it was a bit too disorganized and unkempt in parts, perhaps losing the feeling of a garden. But it had the most incredible atmosphere, and almost 2 years later it’s still one of the places I think back to the most. Flowers were far fewer and smaller, plants seeded everywhere, and the buzz of insects was deafening. It was wild and overwhelming at times, but also gentle and comforting at others. Gerritsen’s approach is far messier and less structured than Oudolf’s, and I’m sure many visitors to his garden have been left wondering ‘where the garden is’. But in the end, for me at least, this kind of ‘borderline’ garden provided a richer experience than many other gardens I have been to, one of being truly immersed in an outdoor, green space.



Human perceptions of beauty can change, often dramatically, over time. Gardens are no different. Although we’ve been trained for showy flowers and ‘designed landscapes’, we’ve already started to appreciate new types of gardens. Maybe we can push this even further, and come to appreciate all sorts of experiments as gardens - even those with – rumpled textures, subdued flowers and a little bit of chaos just beyond our control.