The garden in summer

Summer, floral symphony

June:
In the Clos Normand, the last irises make way for warmer colours. June is the month of the rose, which expresses itself in all forms and structures: free, in parasols, on stem or half-stem (pyramidal structures which culminate at 2.50 meters high).

The event in the Japanese pond is of course the arrival of the first water lilies, their first white, pink and yellow buds appearing towards the end of the month.

July:
In the Clos Normand, the annuals planted at the end of May and in June grow more and more.
This is the season of the first snapdragons, cosmos, carnations, impatiens, amaranths, begonias, cleomes, plus the pink and red geraniums flowering in front of Claude Monet’s house. Flowers with sweet, unusual names can be seen in the Clos: melampodium, browallia, cuphea or more gaura lindheimeri. The sunflowers, in bloom, can reach to 4 meters in height. The hollyhocks are also amazingly tall.

The colour scheme of each bed and the general plan of the garden become clearer.
In the Japanese pond, the water lilies reign supreme, the frogs and moorhens sing contentedly in the water.

August:
In the Clos Normand, the dahlias and gladioli reach their full bloom and are joined by a multitude ofannuals at their best: red, orange and yellow sage, carnations, tithonias (Mexican sunflower) and rudbeckias. The garden comes ablaze in the heart of summer.

The Japanese pond requires a gardener on the water every day. As in Monet’s time, he is in charge of cutting the leaves and the algae every morning to both allow reflections on the water and to maintain the water lilies. On the other hand, he no longer has to remove from the leaves soot and dust deposited by the train which use to pass nearby…