Impressionist plantings

Let famed painter Monet’s green thumb inspire you to grow a masterpiece

Water lilies still bloom in Monet’s garden.
Water lilies still bloom in Monet’s garden.

— Monet’s ideas and techniques Want to get the look of Monet’s garden in your yard? Try some of Claude Monet’s techniques.

photo

The New York Botanical Garden

The artist Claude Monet on the green Japanese bridge over the pond in his garden in Giverny, France. This photo illustration, created by The New York Botanical Garden, is based on a black-and-white photograph from 1922. Monet painted his garden until the year he died, in 1926.

Look for the light - Monet planted white flowers here and there throughout his garden so that, even in shaded areas, the light would seem to sparkle. He studied “the art of reflection,” says Adair Weingart, a master gardener at the Monet garden in Overland Park, Kan.

Raise the roses - Monet grew roses on trellises, lifting the flowers up into the light, where he painted them against a clear blue sky.

Frame the fabulous - “It was also the framing,” Weingart says, “the way he would use trees and shrubs and plants to frame a specific thing. It was an intentional organization. He created that view.”

  • Marty Ross

photo

Uclick

Inspiration abounds in Monet’s garden. This golden view of Monet’s pond captures a luminous moment in early fall.

Gardening is an art - and flowers and foliage are the dabs of paint that bring the canvas of a garden to life.

For the great impressionist artist Claude Monet, the distinction between art and gardens was grandly and gloriously blurred. His garden in Giverny, France, was his inspiration.

“My most beautiful work of art is my garden,” he said. It captivated his imagination and filled his canvases. To see a bit of what he saw and how he saw it, plant a Monet garden.

The New York Botanical Garden did just that last year, drawing on Monet’s palette and ideas in an elaborate exhibition designed to evoke the artist’s passion for plants and to inspire visitors to create artistic gardens of their own.

photo

Uclick

The Japanese bridge in Monet’s garden, covered with wisteria.

“He just knew how to use colors,” says Karen Daubmann, director of exhibitions at botanical garden. The exhibition was “lush and immersive,” she says, “but I hope that people could look at his garden beds and say, ‘I could do a chunk of that in my backyard.’”

Monet was an enthusiastic gardener who searched out the newest and best plants for his garden, experimented with combinations of colors and textures, and planted trial beds, which he called “paint-box beds.”

“Monet really inspired us,” Daubmann says. “He was always eagerly awaiting anything he could get his hands on. He feels like a kindred spirit.”

IMPRESSIONIST INSPIRATIONS

Monet’s garden in France is an exceedingly popular tourist destination; hundreds of thousands of visitors come every year to see the tulips in spring and to cross the green Japanese bridge over the pond, to see the magical light for themselves and the famous water lilies in bloom. Large and elaborate gardens can be intimidating, but gardeners have long embraced Monet’s exuberant garden style, adapting it to the scale of their backyards.

“Monet crowded everything together,” says Adair Weingart, who works with a group of master gardeners on a Monet garden in the Kansas City area, at the Overland Park (Kan.) Arboretum and Botanical Gardens. To take Monet’s style to the edge of the prairie, she says, “we make sure there is a layering of plants, from ground level all the way up.” The garden was planned and planted in 2003 and has become one of the most popular areas of the botanical gardens.

About 75 Kansas Master Gardeners work on the Monet garden every year, meeting there each week to plant, prune, weed and maintain the garden. They plant restful color schemes - pink and white on one side of a path and blue and white on the other - in what they call the “morning garden,” where the light is soft. Their “sunset garden” is filled with reds, oranges and yellows. “Monet had those on the west side,too,” Weingart says. “The light reflected on them so intensely, and they seemed to glow.”

STYLE AND PHILOSOPHY

Weingart has never been to Giverny, and Daubmann did not have the chance to visit, either, but Monet’s considerable body of work makes his garden style and philosophy accessible. The exhibition at The New York Botanical Garden included two paintings of Monet’s irises. His paint palette was also part of the show: It could in itself be a design for a flower garden, with bright yellow, splashes of coral, rich blues, green and gray of every hue, and dabs of white, like the light piercing a leafy canopy.

The garden produced a spreadsheet of the more than 600 plants they used in the exhibition. A water lily that blooms in the pond at Giverny and in Monet’s series of enormous water-lily paintings is a variety named James Brydon. Like Monet, the New York gardeners also grew dahlias, sunflowers, zinnias, nasturtiums, cosmos, hollyhocks, more than a dozen different roses, and bright red geraniums.

A touch of paint

An authentic Monet garden needs a touch of paint, too. The shutters and stairs at Monet’s house, his Japanese bridge, and the great arches over a garden path are all a distinctive green.

At New York Botanical Garden, researchers matched it to Pantone 327 (and Benjamin Moore Juniper 2048-20), a green with a lively infusion of teal. A bridge and other architectural elements in the exhibition were all painted Pantone 327, according to director of exhibitions, Karen Daubmann.

“It’s a great color,” Daubmann says. “It looks fantastic with plants, no matter what we put next to it. If you are inspired to transform your garden with a can of paint, try it on a bench or on flowerpots,” she says. Set your bench among the flowers, and when the light is just right, you’ll have yourself a masterpiece.

  • Marty Ross

Informality key to design

To bring out the art in a garden, turn to an artist for inspiration. Gardeners today can grow some of the same water lilies Claude Monet cultivated in his garden in Giverny, France, about 50 miles northwest of Paris, where he lived for 43 years. The garden is maintained today as it was in Monet’s day.

Monet blurred the formal edges of his garden with exuberant blooms of all kinds, letting sunflowers and hollyhocks lean as they liked, and allowing nasturtiums to sprawl riotously across paths. For plenty of inspiration, visit the garden’s substantial website at giverny.org.

Highlights of the New York Botanical Garden’s exhibition on Monet’s garden remain on the NYBG website: nybg.org/exhibitions/2012/monet/index.php.

The Overland Park Arboretum and Botanical Gardens in Kansas City is open every day except Christmas. The Monet Garden is especially pretty from spring through frost. For information, visit opkansas.org.

  • Marty Ross

HomeStyle, Pages 35 on 02/02/2013

Upcoming Events