If you are not able to travel to Giverny, France to experience the world famous gardens of Claude Monet, you can visit New York. In the Bronx over the next several months, the
New York Botanical Garden will offer a taste of Monet’s indisputably radiant living masterpiece — a riotous display of color, plant variety and landscape design.
The exhibition, which runs through Oct. 21, will feature a seasonally changing display of flora, currently a spring kaleidoscope of poppies, roses, foxgloves, irises and delphiniums inside the botanical garden’s Enid A. Haupt Conservancy. It also includes two scarcely seen garden-inspired paintings, Monet’s wooden palette, rare photos of Monet in his garden and 30 photographs of Giverny by Elizabeth Murray, who has recorded Monet’s flower oasis for 25 years. These are all located at the botanical garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library.
A facade of Monet’s pink stucco house with its bright green shutters — a historically accurate replica by Tony Award-winning set designer Scott Park — marks the start of the exhibition. From there, visitors are led down the Grand Allee, a shorter recreation of Monet’s rose-covered trellis pathway lined on both sides with thick beds of vibrant flowers. The path opens up to a replica of his famous Japanese footbridge arching over a water lily pool encircled by willow trees and flowering shrubs.
In the courtyard outside the Victorian greenhouse, two immense water basins contain a plethora of water lilies.
Claude Monet, artist and avid gardener, lead the Impressionist movement and revolutionized painting in the 1870s.
The story is that Claude Monet noticed the village of Giverny while looking out of a train window. He made up his mind to move there and rented a house and the area surrounding it. In 1890 he had enough money to buy the house and land outright and set out to create the magnificent gardens he wanted to paint.
Talk about the power of imagination!
