Five Lessons from the Flower Garden Master

May 24th, 2022

   Flower color is one of nature’s most joyous gifts to people.

Monet’s 2-acre front-yard garden looks like “an explosion at a paint factory,” as one writer described it.

   Even non-gardeners appreciate it, while many a gardener strives to load the yard with a nonstop parade of flower power from the season’s first hellebores to the last Montauk daisy petal of fall.

   That’s not easy.

   More color means more plants, more effort, and especially a lot of skill to orchestrate it all.

   No one was better at that than the French master painter Claude Monet, who was arguably one of the world’s best flower gardeners in addition to being one of its best-ever artists.

   Monet created a magnificent 2-acre flower garden across the front of his modest home in Giverny, a countryside village about an hour drive west of Paris. He built it mainly as a model for his paintings.

   Some 130 years after Monet begin painting, his Giverny garden is still turning out massive color. It’s the most exuberant flower garden I’ve ever seen, and it fires on all cylinders all season long.

   One writer observed that the garden reads like an “explosion at a paint factory.”

   I first saw Monet’s garden six years ago in September, when dahlias, sunflowers, nasturtiums, mums, cosmos, zinnias, and numerous other summer annuals dominated the landscape.

   I saw it again a few weeks ago on a group tour I hosted with Lowee’s Group Tours. Despite being filled with all different plants, it was still full and colorful even though it was so early in the gardening season.

   This time, the wall-to-wall color was coming from the end of the tulip bloom, from cool-season annuals such as pansies and wallflowers, from May-blooming perennials such as salvia, irises, and woodland phlox, and from the beginning of rose bloom.

   Following Monet’s long ago lead, today’s staff masterfully color-coordinates each vignette and constantly plants, deadheads, and replants to achieve that difficult goal of color everywhere all season long.

   It’s a living textbook in how to mix and match plants.

   Maybe we can’t recreate Monet’s 2 acres of blooming glory, but we can glean a few lessons on how to improve our yards’ color show.

   Five of them that struck me…

   The power of annuals. Yeah, you have to replant annual flowers every year, but no other class of plants delivers so much color for so long.

Most of the color from this bed is coming from spring bulbs and early-season annuals.

   Monet’s garden uses annuals for at least a third to a half of the total space, and it goes through at least two different sets of annuals each year.

   Frost-tolerant pansies and wildflowers go in as early as March to give non-stop color until summer heat takes them down in June. Then a wide range of summer annuals replaces them to carry the color the rest of the way until frost.

   We can also use violas, dianthus, snapdragons, dusty miller, osteospermum, nemesia, diascia, and annual phlox for Round 1. Then we can pick from a slew of warm weather annuals as those fade, including between petunias, celosia, geraniums, begonias, zinnias, marigolds, lantana, angelonia, vinca, and many more.

   To hold down cost, we can even direct-seed cosmos, nasturtiums, nicotiana, sunflowers, and tithonia as well as zinnias and marigolds.

These colors look good together because they’re all in the warm-color family.

   Match those colors. Color was Monet’s strong suit, and he had a natural eye for it (at least until he developed cataracts.)

   A few strategies help us non-masters.

   One is to stick with single-color or “monochromatic” groupings and use different shades of that choice in each bed, i.e. a pink garden, a yellow/gold garden, or a blue garden.

   A second strategy is to group flowers into one of the two main color families and then use two or more choices from the same family.

   The warm-color family includes bright hues such as red, gold, orange, burgundy, and sunny yellow.

   The cool-color family includes softer hues such as blue, pink, lavender, pastel peach, and buttery yellow.

   White, green, black, purple, silver, and gray are neutral colors that usually fit in well with either family.

   A third strategy trumps everything else – if you like the combination, it’s right. After all, it’s your garden.

The red wallflower blooms are echoed in the petals of the tulips.

   “Echo” your colors. Especially masterful is when you can pair the color in one flower with the same color in a different part of another flower.

   Example, look for a tulip with burgundy-red petals to pair with a pansy that has the same burgundy shading in its throat.

   This is a technique known as “color echoing.”

   Capitalize on bloom times. One of the most difficult pairing jobs to pull off – especially with perennials and shrubs that bloom in fairly short-lived bursts – is getting neighbors to bloom at the same time.

   Books, websites, and plant tags can give you a start, but the best strategy is to chart or at least pay attention to what blooms in your yard when – then plant based on that real-world, first-hand experience.

   Annuals are useful here, too, because most of them bloom non-stop for months rather than in two- or three-week bursts. These are like the glue that holds the color show together as the different perennials and shrubs come and go.

   You’ll hit the Monet jackpot when you manage to get a mix of annuals, perennials, and shrubs to all bloom in concert – and in coordinating colors, too.

The plants in this Monet bed will have to be changed out to keep it looking just as colorful into summer and fall.

   Think through the whole season. If you don’t plan well or pay attention to bloom times, it’s easy to end up with a garden that’s colorful part of the season but then barren for the rest.

   The most common mistake is having a garden that peaks in May or June because that’s when people do most plant shopping and therefore load up on what looks good then.

   When you plant, pick enough diversity that you have at least a few things in color each month from spring to fall.

   If you miss on the first try, make note of your down time in the garden and then make it a point to add varieties that bloom then.

   Or just plant more annuals.

   For help with this one, see my chart on what blooms when in south-central Pennsylvania.