Most artists' houses keep the work. This one keeps the subject, and the subject needs weeding.
Monet came to Giverny in the spring of 1883 as a tenant and bought the house seven years later, in November 1890. What he found was an ordinary Norman property: a long pink rendered building, an apple orchard, a kitchen garden, a central path lined with spruce and cypress, box hedging round the beds. What he did to it is the part I keep returning to in print. He had the box pulled out. He had the spruce felled — over his wife Alice's objections — and put up the metal arches that still carry the roses. He replaced the apple trees with cherries and apricots, and laid out rectangular beds of single colours on the left of the garden, which is not gardening so much as a palette set down in soil.
Then, in 1893, he bought the strip of ground at the bottom of the Clos Normand, on the far side of the railway line, and diverted the Ru — a small branch of the Epte — to make a pond. He set a bridge across it on the axis of the garden's central path, in the Japanese manner but painted green rather than the red he would have seen in the prints, and he planted the pond with water lilies chosen, by his own account, more or less at random out of a catalogue. He began painting them in 1897 and did not really stop. A gardener was kept on the water full time, lifting off the dead leaves. That is the fact that undoes me: a man employing someone to keep his subject in a fit state to be looked at.
I have not been. I have said, for some years and in a tone I am not proud of, that it is too crowded — which is a statement about other people and not about the place, and it has kept me from the one house in France built the way I claim to admire. So the entry stands as an intention with a plate number. The plan is early May, the first admission of the day out of Saint-Lazare, and no opinion issued until I have walked the water garden twice: once at the bridge, where everyone stands, and once from the far bank, where I suspect the composition actually is.
The plates are held empty on purpose. There are ten thousand photographs of this pond and not one of them is mine.
A painting can be left in a dark store for forty years. A garden cannot.
Monet died at Giverny in 1926. His son Michel inherited, and on Michel's death in 1966 the house and grounds passed to the Académie des beaux-arts, which owns them still. In between, and after, the thing simply went on not being tended, which for a garden is the same as being demolished slowly.
The restoration was led from 1977 by Gérald Van der Kemp, who had spent his working life on Versailles, and the house and gardens opened to visitors in 1980. So what one walks into now is late-1970s work carried forward by gardeners every season since — a garden that has to be re-earned every April, from beds that were once a painter's idea and are now a document maintained by hand.
I do not think that makes it less. It makes it a different kind of object from the rest of this directory: not a house preserved but a subject kept alive, and the only entry here whose authenticity is a question you answer with a hose. Whether it survives that question is the thing I am actually going to Giverny to find out.