Giverny

I came to Giverny braced for disappointment. It is one of the most photographed gardens on earth, an hour from Paris by train, and everything I love I expect to be ruined by the time I arrive. As a French person I also carry a slight reflexive suspicion of anything that has become a brand. So I will admit, with the bad grace of someone whose cynicism has been defeated, that Giverny is wonderful, and that Claude Monet knew exactly what he was doing when he spent the last forty-three years of his life turning this patch of the Eure valley into a living painting.

The garden as a deliberate act

There are really two gardens, and they are different in temperament. The Clos Normand, directly in front of the pink house with green shutters, is a riot — long beds packed so densely with flowers that the gravel paths feel like the only thing holding back chaos. Monet planted by colour the way he painted, in blocks and washes, and the effect in early summer is almost aggressive in its abundance. Nasturtiums spill across the central path until it nearly closes. I stood there thinking that this is not a tasteful English garden of restraint; it is a painter shouting.

Then you go under the road, through a small tunnel, into the water garden, and the volume drops. This is the part Monet built later, diverting a branch of the river Epte against the objections of suspicious neighbours who feared his exotic plants would poison the water. The pond, the weeping willows, the bamboo, and of course the green Japanese bridge dripping with wisteria — this is the landscape of the Nymphéas, the water lily paintings that consumed his final decades and that now wrap around entire rooms at the Orangerie in Paris. To stand on that bridge and look down at the actual lilies, the actual reflections of willow and sky, after a lifetime of seeing them rendered in paint, is genuinely dizzying. The painting and the place collapse into each other.

How to survive the crowds

I will not pretend it is a private idyll. Giverny receives enormous numbers of visitors, and at midday in July the water garden path becomes a slow shuffling queue where everyone is photographing the bridge and nobody can see the pond. The trick, which I offer as hard-won advice, is to arrive at opening time. Lia and I were at the gate before it opened, went straight to the water garden while the first coaches were still parking, and had a clear ten minutes on the bridge with only the sound of birds and the occasional gardener. That ten minutes was worth the early alarm and the whole trip.

Afterwards, walk the village itself — it is small and pretty and holds the church where Monet is buried, a modest family plot you would walk past without the sign. There is something right about that modesty after the maximalism of the garden. The man poured his ambition into the flowers, not the headstone.

When to go: The garden is open roughly April to early November and is at its most spectacular from May to July. Arrive at opening or in the last hour before closing to escape the worst crowds. Spring brings tulips and wisteria; late summer brings the dahlias and nasturtiums. Book train and entry ahead in high season.