Monet's water lily pond needed a planning appeal. Neighbours feared his flowers would poison the stream.
Before he painted his famous water lilies, Claude Monet had to build their pond, and to fill it he needed to divert a local stream. The villagers of Giverny objected. The painter swore, nearly gave up, and then appealed to the regional prefect, who said yes in July 1893.
Monet arrived in Giverny in April 1883, facing eviction for unpaid rent from his previous home. He had spotted the small Normandy village from a train window while house-hunting for his large blended family of ten. He rented a long pink farmhouse with an orchard, and in the first year the household planted the garden and painted the shutters green. By 1890 he could afford to buy the property for 20,000 francs.
In February 1893 Monet bought a marshy plot across the railway line, crossed by a small brook, to create a water garden. He applied to divert the brook to fill a pond he had dug. Some locals objected that his flowers would poison the water, and engineers raised concerns. Monet, furious, briefly thought of throwing his lilies in the river. He revised his plan, was refused by the municipality, and wrote to the prefect that the work was for aquatic plants 'for the pleasure of the eyes and in order to have subjects to paint'. Approval came on 27 July. That autumn a visitor described a green bridge that looked rather Japanese. In 1902 he won permission to divert more water, and the pond roughly tripled in size.
Monet was a serious gardener. He took advice from a Japanese gardener in 1891, likely Wasuke Hata, built a heated glasshouse, visited Rouen's botanical garden and bought plants there, and by 1904 employed six full-time gardeners. He painted these gardens for the rest of his life, above all the lily pond, the bridge and a weeping willow.
After his death in 1926, and his stepdaughter Blanche's in 1947, the garden fell into ruin: mud filled the pond and termites attacked the bridge. Restoration was led by Gérald Van der Kemp, a former chief curator of Versailles, and about 95 per cent of its $7 million cost came from private, mostly American, donors. Replanted with the species Monet used, it opened to the public in 1980 and drew 530,000 visitors in 2010.
Source: Wikipedia — Fondation Monet in Giverny · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
