Editing Monet's Garden
Naomi Baltuck
5/31/20252 min read
…The line was endless, but once past the ticket booth, we joined the swarm of tourists overrunning both house and garden. We heard a dozen languages spoken by people from all over world, who had come to see the inspiration for Monet’s most famous paintings.
It was eye candy, a stunning profusion of color! But instead of the rare and exotic flora I expected, the flowers were all, well, your regular garden variety. Irises, roses, pansies, forget-me-nots…nothing I don’t grow in my own garden, but artfully arranged by height, texture, and color. And, after all, they were in Monet’s Garden.
I wanted to capture at least the illusion of solitude and serenity of the garden, as I thought it must have been in Monet’s day. I waited for lulls in foot traffic to get my shots. While waiting, I watched all that humanity shuffling by, caught glimpses of peoples’ lives as moving as anything in those historic gardens. Mothers and children, old couples holding hands, a little boy with eyes only for the baby chicks, four generations of women, sharing a park bench.
While we writers strive to capture a mood or feeling or effect, we can also observe the stories happening all around us. The first is like a very pretty still life, a posed portrait of Mother Nature.
There is beauty in it all.
