Giverny

Water lilies float on green water beneath a Japanese bridge draped in wisteria, the garden arranged exactly as Monet painted it — which is to say, he arranged it to paint. Giverny, in France's Seine valley, is the garden that became the painting that became the garden again, a loop of art and horticulture that still functions, and the light through the willows is the light in the canvases.

Claude Monet arrived in this Seine-side village in 1883 and lived here until his death in 1926, turning a Norman farmhouse and its land into two gardens: the flower garden beside the house, and across the road the water garden he made by diverting a stream — to the annoyance of his neighbours — and planting with the water lilies that became his last monumental series. The house keeps its yellow dining room, blue kitchen and the Japanese prints he collected, and the gardens follow the growing season from spring to autumn. Down the road, the Musée des Impressionnismes was built with American money in memory of the American painters who followed Monet here, and the old Hôtel Baudy, where Cézanne, Renoir, Sisley and Rodin ate, keeps its 1900s décor.