Took a trip and saw the flowers
One of the ways Claude Monet and I are similar is our appreciation for gobs of colorful flowers of many shapes. One of our differences is how he captured the depths of their colors and shapes in imaginative ways on canvas and I instead gaze at them intently and smile and look up their names on my phone.
Monet painted his own imaginative vision of reality which inspired the name Impressionism. His paintings feature bridges over water, haystacks, cathedrals and boats on a river, but he is also remembered for his paintings of flowers, shrubs and forests at different times of day in all four seasons. He noticed the subtle difference in a scene when the light changed. He once put on an exhibition with only his paintings of waterlilies, and eventually produced more than 250 paintings of scenes with waterlilies.
I mention this because last weekend, I took a trip to Kansas City and visited the Overland Park Arboretum and Botanical Gardens. A prominent feature there is the one-acre Monet Garden with flower gardens intended to replicate the styles and moods of his extensive gardens at Giverny. One walkway will feature bold reds, yellows and oranges and another the calmer vibe of blues and whites with a background of prairie grasses. Young hackberry shrubs with berries make a stable feature at a corner of a pathway.
Color mixtures in beds were very creative – a whale’s tongue agave with green stonecrop sedum sprawling underneath surrounded by coleuses, meadow sage, zinnias and milkweed of various hues. I sat for a moment and watched bees and bugs flitting with abandon on a patch of perennials with tiny purple-blue flowers. Calms a person. How invigorating it would be to work here except for heavy lifting and long hours in the weather.
Creating your own Monet Garden will require space, budget, time and enthusiasm. You have a supercomputer full of advice in your pocket if you want any, so guidance is waiting. The botanical garden I wandered through has a budget different from mine, but an adventurous gardener can begin simply. So, let’s design some flower beds ala Monet.
If your available space is a 1×3 sq.-ft. plot of ground beside a sidewalk, then become Monet for a moment. Beside the sidewalk could be shorter annuals such as blue lobelia alternating with white alyssum in front of echinacea (your choice of color), goldenrods, zinnias or ferns. Or fill the whole space with a variety of coleuses for the summer.
I returned from Kansas City with a bucket of plant starts because my friend has been creating a front yard resembling a mostly contained native plant jungle for ten years. It’s wonderful to wander through, and the point is gardeners you know might have starts for your 1×3-sq. ft. space.
Your options increase as the space available increases. I began filling in spaces by learning a little about various deer-resistant plants but without serious planning for color combinations or how big the plants might be in two or three years.
I might be surprised next summer or the next at what my enthusiasm created. I suspect I might enjoy a bit of floral mayhem if it’s colorful. In the front yard garden space I just visited in Kansas City were plants such as asters and lantana that over years became huge masses. Folks who plan ahead would already have planned for this, but not me. First-year plants, like first-year puppies, might grow bigger than expected and require maintenance (like puppies).
Different sages pair well with wormwood. Sneak in a few Sweet Williams (white, red, pink) with butterfly weed (yellow, orange). Many homeowners like the impressive size and colors hosta leaves, but not as much as roving deer. Animals live here too, so design your Monet with sharing in mind.
The spring gardens around Eureka Springs have a Monet vibe – thoughtfully arranged with wildness implied. So, plant your garden your way, and Monet might wish he had thought of it first.