Every day, gardeners at Giverny had to moisten the leaves of water lilies so they would better reflect light. After all, Impressionism means painting light itself. This meticulous attention to detail in Claude Monet's legendary garden reveals the profound connection between the master painter and the natural world that inspired his most famous works.
In April 1883, Claude Monet discovered what would become his artistic sanctuary during a train journey from Poissy to Vernon. Whether he glimpsed red tulips blooming through his train window or late narcissus stretching their chalices toward the spring sun remains unknown, but what is certain is that the 43-year-old painter spotted a farmer's garden and a house on the north side that seemed perfect for his ten-member blended family. Despite being desperately poor at the time, Monet rented the small property and wrote in May: "I am in ecstasy. Giverny is a magnificent country for me."
This land and its flowers would eventually make Monet wealthy, particularly the water lilies he first encountered at the 1889 World's Fair in Paris. The painter fell in love with flowers for their grace, appreciating both their delicate and bold tones, the shimmering light they captured, their floral abundance, and naturally, the love life that blossoms display without shame. "Perhaps I only became a painter because of flowers," Monet wrote while contemplating forget-me-nots and nasturtiums, gladioli and dahlias, and the entire variety of his cottage garden filled with hollyhocks, bellflowers, and geraniums.
The garden at Giverny grew into a masterpiece of horticultural design. Proud standard roses reached toward the sky in wide sweeps, while playful climbing roses cascaded near the famous Japanese bridge alongside tumbling wisteria, blue rain, and clematis. Later, Monet had a pond dug where water lilies would grow, their surface multiplying the light and beauty of the entire garden. Monet shaped nature according to his vision, making himself the creator of his art's subjects. The garden became an artwork designed to create another, perhaps even greater, artistic achievement.
With paintings of his garden and water landscapes, Monet soon earned substantial money. He purchased the house, bought more land for additional flowers, and created more paintings and beauty. One year before his death, he completed his final water lily cycle, comprising 22 large paintings that would become his artistic legacy.
The fascination with flowers extends far beyond artistic inspiration. Flowers give us hope by conveying the idea that life knows no end but follows a cycle where everything can begin anew, where death has meaning. Every bloom proves both mortality and rebirth - a flower must wither so its fruits can grow and its seeds can spread. The sole purpose of a blossom is to ensure reproduction.
Even Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis and an avid garden lover, found deep meaning in flowers. He believed that plants in dreams represented or concealed sexual desires. During a mountain hike in summer 1913 with poet Rainer Maria Rilke and his lover Lou Andreas-Salomé, Freud observed that Rilke could only see nature's beauty as "harbingers of loss," unable to perceive the transformative capacity of all living things. Freud, conversely, celebrated how the beauty of flowers returns after winter's destruction, and that this renewal, relative to our lifespan, could be called eternal.
The evolutionary significance of our attraction to flowers reveals humanity's deep connection to beauty. The oldest plant found in a human settlement is 23,000 years old - resembling a daisy that couldn't be eaten and served no medicinal purpose, yet existed in abundance on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Psychologist Jeannette Haviland-Jones and geneticist Terry McGuire from Rutgers University suggest that around 5,000 years ago, wildflowers self-seeded on farmers' cleared soil and thrived particularly well in tilled earth.
Perhaps farmers let these flowers remain, cultivating the most beautiful ones, propagating and gifting them, decorating houses and graves of the dead simply because they found the flowers pleasing - just as people by the Sea of Galilee appreciated those ancient daisies. We love nature not only because it feeds us, but because it makes our lives more beautiful. As plant ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi, explains in her book "Honorable Harvest," when asked why she chose to study biology, she answered that she wanted to discover why asters and goldenrod look so beautiful together.
The answer lies in shared perception: while bees have different color vision than humans, they perceive yellow and violet just as we do. Asters growing near goldenrod and vice versa are pollinated significantly more frequently, demonstrating that beauty serves both aesthetic and biological purposes. Through Monet's garden at Giverny, we see how the intersection of human creativity and natural beauty creates something transcendent - where art imitates life, and life, in turn, becomes art.
