Wednesday: June 10
Today we boarded the tour bus with Jean Jacques and drove to Giverny where we visited Monet's house, studio and gardens.
Monet spent 40 years here, using his gardens as the inspiration for most of his paintings.
Monet designed and built this wonderful water garden with its Japanese bridges and picturesque clumps of flowers and lilies.
The grounds are filled with roses, pansies, foxglove, delphinium, marigolds, salvia, cosmos, poppies and bachelor's buttons.
After wandering through even a portion of the grounds, it's pretty easy to see why he chose the water lilies as a subject for so many of his paintings.
The plant palette includes cooler colors, such as blue and lavender in the shady portions of the gardens.
The water lilies range in color from pale white to a rich pink.
Here and there along the walking path, particularly striking pots of unusual flower varieties may be seen.
Flowers in the sunnier parts of the garden display scarlet, purple, yellow, and orange blooms. Trellises of wild roses abound.
Pale pink roses against an ancient whitewashed stone wall are difficult to resist.
The sheer beauty of this Normandy village and exquisite farmhouse with its gardens made it extremely difficult to choose which photos to post to our web site from the 75 or so I actually shot....Tonight, we're off for a dinner and evening cruise down the Seine River. The transportation strike is still on, and last night there were riots in Concorde Square, spilling over into the Opera House.