Giverny — Monet's House and Gardens Day Trip

Claude Monet moved to Giverny in 1883 and lived there for the last 43 years of his life, gradually buying up surrounding land to expand a garden he designed and tended as carefully as any of his paintings — famously employing several full-time gardeners even as an already-established artist, treating the garden itself as an ongoing creative project rather than a backdrop.

The property splits into two parts: the Clos Normand, a dense, colour-planned flower garden directly behind Monet's pink house with green shutters, and the Water Garden across the road, created by diverting a small tributary of the Seine to form the lily pond that Monet painted obsessively in his final decades, including the monumental Water Lilies series now housed at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. The Japanese-inspired footbridge crossing the pond, itself repeatedly painted by Monet, remains one of the most recognisable single features of any artist's garden anywhere.