France: Day 2 Giverny and Monet's Gardens

I love gardens.  I love flowers.  I love the colors, the textures, the fragrance.  I love the relaxed pace that a garden gives me--that I forget time and focus on the tiny details of the buds about to bloom and the bugs crawling around.  So I set out to Giverny to see Monet's actual gardens.  I wanted to see the lighting he saw.  I wanted to immerse myself in his environment.  So, how different were his gardens to his paintings?  As the focus of the Impressionists was to capture the true essence of light, I thought experiencing "Monet's light" was an important part of the process of evaluating the colors in his paintings.   

 

The greatest part of the day in Giverny was the fact that the weather changed.  It started sunny, clouds moved in and it got chilly and overcast, then the sun came out and washed the clouds away bright as could be.  All these changes happened as I made my way through the gardens.  I took my time, leisurely walking through the gardens enjoying the scenery and taking copious amounts of photos, trying to soak in every detail I could and capturing the overall scene, different viewpoints and details. 

I have tried to pick my “favorite” photos from Monet’s Gardens, but trying to do that is like trying to pick just a couple macarons to eat at Laudree or Fortnum and Mason—when looking at your options your automatic answer is “I’ll take them all, thank you!” but your brain knows that you cannot actually eat the whole counter of them (or pay!).  In the same way, I would love to show you all my photos I took but alas I have had to heavily edit down which ones I share!

It was so interesting to watch how the color of the flowers changed as the clouds rolled in.  The highlights disappearing and the overall contrast from highlight to color to shadow mellowing. 

As the sun came back out, you can see the harder highlights that it gave to the flowers.  It was interesting to see which flowers popped during the different weather conditions and when photographing them (whether among other plants, against the sky or water). 

You cannot go to Monet's gardens and not pay attention to the water lilies. 

The water was so still the whole time and it was exciting to see the reflections in the water adapt to the changing weather. 

The sun had just popped out and everything looked like it had a "top coating" of sun just on the top edges of everything.

Clouds moving back in ....

I love taking photos of moss and with the interesting twisting and looping of the branch, I could not resist capturing this moss!

Haystacks (not the actual ones Monet painted)!