“A French Impression”: Spring Bulb Show Evokes Monet's Garden

Events

The 2015 Bulb Show featured works by Monet, as part of the theme “A French Impression.”

Published March 3, 2015

Impressionist painter Claude Monet once called his garden his “most beautiful masterpiece.”

In addition—noted Robert Nicholson, manager of Smith’s Lyman Conservatory—the artist is known for having declared, “apart from painting and gardening, I’m no good at anything.”

This year’s spring bulb show, which opens Saturday, March 7, at 10 a.m. at Lyman Conservatory, was inspired by the connections between Monet’s two art forms.

The show, which Nicholson and a small crew of students and Botanic Garden staff has been planning since last summer, will recreate the themes of Monet’s garden in Giverny, France—one of the most visited gardens in the world.

“A French Impression” at the Smith Botanic Garden features a façade of Monet’s house and some 7,000 flowering plants in the vivid colors the artist used in both his garden plots and his paintings.

“Monet was a person addicted to color,” Nicholson said. “The hardest part about preparing the show has been pinning down the shades he used and finding a match.”

The bulb show’s opening lecture will highlight a form of garden art as engaging as Monet’s, but one that springs from a different source: traditional African American gardens.

Award-winning photographer Vaughn Sills will speak on Friday, March 6, at 7:30 p.m. in the Campus Center Carroll Room about the artistic journey behind her 2010 book Places for the Spirit: Traditional African American Gardens.

An exhibit of 30 of Sills’ striking black-and-white photographs of African American gardens in the American South will be on view in the Church Exhibition Gallery, Lyman Conservatory, through September 30.

The spring bulb show, which Nicholson said attracts more than 20,000 visitors to Smith each year, will be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily from March 7 through March 22. This year, the show will also be open for extended weekend hours, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. The suggested donation is $5.

Aliza Fassler ’17, who hails from Greenfield, Mass., remembers coming to the bulb show when she was little. This year Fassler is among those working behind the scenes to mount “A French Impression.”

“There are a lot of details that go into it,” Fassler said one recent afternoon, while taking a break from painting a fence in a shade of Monet-inspired blue.

“I’m a big fan of Monet,” added Fassler, who is majoring in biology.

Connecticut landscape architect Susan Cohen ’62 has given talks on Monet’s garden at various venues, including Smith, Cooper Hewitt Museum and The New York Botanical Garden, where she has taught for many years. Cohen’s frequent visits to Monet’s garden in Giverny began with a private tour in 1990, before the site was opened to the public after a restoration.

“Some people may not know that Monet was an avid gardener,” Cohen said. “Before he could afford gardeners, he did all the work himself, and he once wrote that he did not know if he painted in order to garden, or gardened in order to paint.”

Cohen noted that Monet’s garden is really two different gardens separated by the road in front of his house. Across that road is a pond garden with a Japanese footbridge and the water lilies that inspired many of his most famous paintings.

Nicholson said Smith’s bulb show is also organized in two parts to evoke the structure of Monet’s garden. An array of tulips, nasturtiums and forget-me-nots—among other flowers—will echo the exuberant colors Monet used in his garden and his paintings.

The theme of this year’s show offers visitors an inspiring vision of spring, Nicholson said. “And with a winter like this one, we hardly need to advertise,” he added, with a smile.

Q&A with Vaughn Sills

Q. How did you first start collecting images of African American gardens for your book?
Sills: “I began creating this series of photographs almost by chance. I was being given a tour of African American architecture in Athens, Ga. We stopped to visit a friend of the tour guide and I noticed her beautiful garden and began photographing it. Later, I learned about the historical significance of these gardens, which incorporate cultural traditions brought by slaves mostly from the Yoruba and Bakongo tribes of west Africa. The gardens reflect beliefs about the spiritual world and about how one should live one’s life—ideas and beliefs that persist today. To me, the essence of these gardens are spiritual and ethical values. The material objects and the places they inhabit in the yard have meanings that refer to the interior of the gardeners’ lives.”

Q. What are some of the elements of the African American gardens you documented?
Sills: “There is more than one kind of garden you can identify as typically African American. Those that I photographed more often contain numerous objects, and these have particular spiritual and ethical meanings. Rocks that are painted white, for instance, signify both the sacred and good character. Another well known element is the bottle tree, where colorful bottles are placed on the tips of bare branches to capture evil spirits and keep them from the getting into the house and from harming us. The gardens frequently had copper pipes stuck in the ground to allow us to communicate with the spirits of the ancestors. Those are just a few of the common recurring and meaningful elements.”

Q. You’ve noted that the gardening style displayed in African American gardens you documented is disappearing. Why is that happening?
Sills: “When I speak to groups of people, audience members will come up to me and say, ‘This is what my grandmother’s garden looked like.’ The gardens are evolving more than disappearing. Many of the gardens I photographed were in small towns and rural places, though a few were in the cities, and the gardeners themselves were elderly. As people move into the cities and their lives become a part of the urban mainstream, we begin to lose some of these distinct traditions. Still, many of these gardening traditions remain strong.

Q. Has exploring African American gardens changed the way you garden?
Sills: “Yes, it has. I came to love the lush yards and the way meaningful objects are a part of these gardens. I’ve always collected rocks and now I have other, less predictable objects in my garden that are significant to me.”