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Secrets of Monet's Garden
Derek Fell
Claude Monet once said his garden was his most beautiful work of art, and Derek Fell's 1997 book takes that claim seriously. A garden writer and photographer, Fell treats Giverny not just as the backdrop to the water-lily paintings but as a deliberate composition in living color—Monet the plantsman arranging beds and the famous lily pond as a painter arranges pigment. With his own lush photographs and practical detail about the plantings, Fell shows how the garden and the canvases fed each other. It sits happily between an art book and a gardening book, and readers drawn to either will find plenty here. For anyone who has stood before the *Water Lilies* and wondered about the real place behind them, it's an inviting, beautifully illustrated visit.
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The author
Derek Fell (b. 1939) is a British-born, America-based garden writer and photographer who has produced many popular books on gardens and gardening, several exploring the plots of famous painters. His angle is the working gardener's as much as the art lover's.
The book
Secrets of Monet's Garden, published by MetroBooks in 1997, documents the garden Monet built at Giverny from 1883 onward—the flower borders of the Clos Normand and the Japanese-inspired water garden with its lily pond and green bridge—and argues for the tight loop between what Monet planted and what he painted, illustrated largely with Fell's own photographs.
How it reads
It's an accessible, image-led appreciation rather than an art-historical study, and none the worse for it. The pleasure is in seeing the source of the paintings as a designed space, and in the gardening detail Fell brings to Monet's choices.
For more context
Giverny, restored and open to the public since the 1980s, remains one of the most visited artist's gardens in the world and a touchstone for the link between Impressionism and the natural world.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Derek Fell
- Publisher
- MetroBooks (Michael Friedman Publishing Group)
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 1997
- ISBN
- 1-58663-193-4
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine