BY CASEY LESSER
View of Monet’s water
garden, Giverny, France. Photo © Eric Sander.
Each year, from late March
to early November, more than 500,000 people travel to Giverny, France, to visit
a place they’ve primarily seen in paintings.
They arrive to find a
charming pink farmhouse with emerald-green shutters, set among brilliant
flowerbeds that overflow with tulips, lavender, or sunflowers, depending on the
season. They follow signs to a tunnel, and are led to an oasis of weeping
willows and bamboo shoots, where they can amble along a pond packed with
waterlilies, before crossing a familiar Japanese footbridge cloaked in
wisteria.
More than just the idyllic
inspiration and open-air studio behind some of the world’s most famous
paintings, Claude Monet’s gardens in Giverny have long been understood as a
total work of art in their own right. (In 1907, Marcel Proust wrote in an essay
that Giverny was a “transposition of art.”)
Today, the Impressionist
master’s home and gardens—where he lived and worked for most of the second half
of his life—are a site of pilgrimage for not just art lovers but botany buffs,
sightseers, and wanderlust addicts alike. Recently, on July 10th, Jean-Yves Le
Drian, French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, announced that the site
would be a candidate for a UNESCO World Heritage Site designation. That
achievement is due in no small part to Gilbert Vahé, Giverny’s head gardener.
On a cool July afternoon, I
met Vahé in Monet’s gardens. Slight and bespectacled, he wears a simple straw
hat, polo shirt, and leather shoes. His fingernails, encrusted with earth, are
the only clue that gives away his expertise—though shortly after we’re
introduced, as we pass by hordes of visitors to reach a relatively quiet place
to chat, he launches into a critique of some nearby irises.
Vahé has worked at the
gardens for some 35 years, from 1977 to 2011—after which he retired
temporarily—and since January 1, 2017. This year he resumed his position as
head gardener after the departure of Englishman James Priest, who served in the
role for the past six years. Vahé lives next door, where he keeps his own
garden—which is a sight in itself, often stopping tourists in their tracks on
their way to Monet’s home.
As we walk through the Clos
Normand—the main garden beside Monet’s former home, which occupies nearly a
hectare of land—we settle at a small, pebbled clearing, lined with three curved
benches, which were designed by Monet.
Vahé’s post at Giverny
began with the restoration of the gardens in 1977. While Michel Monet, the
artist’s son, had left the property to Paris’s Académie des Beaux-Arts upon his
death in 1966, with a view for it to become a museum, it went untouched for a
decade. An initiative to revive the garden eventually materialized thanks to
the French philanthropist and curator Gérald Van der Kemp, who is also known
for spearheading the restoration of the Palace of Versailles, and who would go
on to become the first director and curator of at Giverny. In 1970, he set up
the Versailles Foundation in New York, which was backed by American patrons,
and would also fund Giverny. But it was not until an auspicious meeting with
Vahé that the gardens really began to take shape.
Vahé was born some 30
kilometers from Giverny, in a town southeast of Paris, and pursued a career in
horticulture at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Horticulture in Versailles,
with the intention of becoming an orchid specialist. He would ultimately set up
his own landscaping business instead, and it was just after shuttering that
venture—when he grew tired of dealing with finances and customers—that he was
introduced to Van der Kemp. The head of the school in Versailles connected the
two men, knowing that Vahé needed work and Van der Kemp was looking for a
skilled horticulturist.
Vahé believes the job was
his destiny, admitting that he never (“Jamais!”) imagined having such a job
when he chose his field of study.
He recalls that at the
time, in 1976, Monet’s gardens were largely unknown in France, save for
intellectual circles; even in the nearest town of Vernon, just six kilometers
away, shopkeepers were unaware that the famous artist had lived there. (Today,
visitors arrive in throngs at the Vernon rail station, before making their way
to Giverny.) Taxi drivers in New York, he quips, were more likely to know about
Van der Kemp’s restoration.
The process of revitalizing
the gardens was slow, spanning a long four years. Vahé worked alongside a team
of fellow gardeners, including one who had worked alongside Monet himself,
while Van der Kemp conducted research that would help to determine what should
be planted and where. None of the plants from Monet’s time had survived, and
the land was overgrown with grass and weeds. They took cues from the artist’s
letters, oral accounts from relatives, photographs, and of course, paintings,
to recreate the legendary garden that Monet had brought to life.
Though Van der Kemp was
separated from the artist by several generations, Vahé notes that he was
well-suited to lead the restoration. Van der Kemp was a painter and gardener
himself, and he was well-connected, moving in circles in Paris that were not so
far removed from those that Monet had engaged with decades earlier.
Monet had bought the
farmhouse and its land in 1883, stumbling upon it while on a walk, and later
permanently traded the avenues of Paris for the rolling hills of Normandy. After
fitting the house to his needs—painting its walls in hues of blue and yellow,
setting up a studio, and hanging it with his collection of Japanese prints—he
turned to the gardens.
He cleared the land of
trees, tilled the soil, and enlisted expert gardeners to help him make the most
of the Normandy landscape, while introducing plants from as far away as Japan.
He initially adopted the French gardening tastes of his day, though drawing
from his artistic instincts, he would eventually develop a style all his own,
carefully plotting out a geometric patchwork of flowerbeds, installing arches
that would be enveloped in flora, and engineering moments of light and color
that would occur throughout…….
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-man-monets-famed-gardens-growing
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