Monet's Palette: The Flower Garden

The flower garden, with its riot of colorful blooms, has a nickname: "Monet's palette." Just as a painter squeezes paint onto a palette, Claude Monet lined up flowers of every color. Plenty of painters left their palettes behind, but none is as dazzling or beautiful as this one.

At first he was only a tenant, so he planted a few favorite flowers here and there. Then a hugely successful solo exhibition in 1886 helped him save up, and in 1890 he bought the house. From then on he threw himself into the garden, and his skill is said to have rivaled that of a professional gardener. He kept three main things in mind when designing it.

The first was color harmony. Monet didn't plant at random. He grouped flowers of similar colors, with more than 80 percent of a bed in one shade, and used complementary colors for the rest as accents. His notes reportedly say that massing a single tone gives a powerful emphasis, and that interspersing complementary colors creates a striking effect. That also explains the "palette" nickname.

The second was bloom time. A garden loses its life when flowers fade, so he planned for a constant display. He swapped in whole seedlings season by season, with spring, summer and autumn bloomers, and even factored in the time of day, choosing flowers that open best in the morning dew or whose colors glow in the evening light.

The third was height. Monet favored showy but low-growing plants, and a garden of those alone was vivid yet flat and monotonous. So he trained climbing roses and wisteria upward, drawing the eye from the ground to the sky. By this point he was as much a gardener as a painter, and his acquaintances reportedly did call him one.

The water garden, where he painted his water lily series, lies across the flower garden and is reached through an underground passage. On this tour we visit the house first, but if the line is long, you can see the water garden first and visit the house before you leave, since you exit through the gift shop beside it anyway. By the way, the restrooms are between the house and the gift shop, next to the chicken coop.