Handpicked experience · Normandy
Normandy, FranceInstant Confirmation
The garden collapsed into ruin after 1947 and was rebuilt from 1977 using Monet's own paintings and photographs — a garden reconstructed from pictures of itself.
A licensed guide walking the property with the group
The story of a ruin and its rebuilding, told on the spot
Flower garden and water garden in one visit
The rooms of the house as he arranged them
Time in the studio that became the shop
Normandy and back inside half a day
A half day from Paris to Giverny with coach transport each way, admission to Monet's house and gardens, and a licensed guide who walks the property with you and explains what you are looking at.
Monet died in 1926. His stepdaughter kept the garden going for another two decades, but after her death in 1947 there was nobody with the will or the means to hold it together.
What followed was collapse. The pond silted up and the plantings went wild or died out. The greenhouses lost their glass, some of it to the war. The Japanese bridge rotted where it stood. By the 1960s the most famous garden in painting was a ruin behind a fence, and photographs from that period are genuinely hard to reconcile with what is there now.
The property came to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in the mid-1960s, and serious restoration began in 1977 under a curator who had spent years putting Versailles back together. Much of the funding came from American donors rather than the French state.
The problem was evidence. Nobody had a plan of the garden, so the team worked backwards from Monet's own paintings, from period photographs of the beds, and from his planting notes and nursery orders, to establish what had grown where and in what season. The garden was reconstructed from the pictures it had been made to produce.
It opened to the public in 1980. So what you walk through is not a survival but a careful reconstruction, and knowing that changes the visit rather than diminishing it.
The building where you can browse afterwards is the large studio built for the water-lily panels — the room where the Orangerie cycle was actually painted, now given over to books and postcards of the same paintings.
A great deal of what is interesting about this place is invisible without someone to point it out: which beds are seasonal successions, which views were painted from where, and what had to be inferred during the rebuilding.
Getting between your accommodation and the Paris departure point is your own arrangement, as are meals, drinks and anything you buy on the day.
Open it to pick a date and work out the price.
What the fare covers, and what to budget for separately.
The practical detail, and the answers people actually ask for.
His stepdaughter kept the garden for two more decades, but her death in 1947 left nobody to maintain it.
The pond silted up, the greenhouses lost their glass and the bridge rotted in place.
It arrived by bequest from the painter's surviving son, who left the estate to a national institution on his death.
Half a century after the painter died. Years of digging and replanting followed before anything resembled a garden again.
Private philanthropy, much of it raised in the United States, where the paintings were already extremely well known.
Detective work. Colour and structure could be read off the canvases, but the actual varieties came from written records of what he ordered.
1980, after three years of reconstruction work on the beds, pond and structures.
The large studio built for the water-lily panels, where that cycle was actually painted.