Book excerpt: In 1890, Claude Monet bought a house at Giverny in Normandy. Soon he had laid out the first of the three studios in which he could paint. Now the garden that was to be a constant source of inspiration for those paintings claimed all his attention. In 1893, work started on the excavation of the famous pond that he would plant with water lilies, and over which he would build a Japanese bridge festooned with wisteria. Richly illustrated with photographs taken as the seasons unfold, this guide takes us on a tour of the house and gardens, inviting us to explore the settings in which Monet and his family spent their daily lives, from the iconic yellow dining room to the famous salon-studio. Adrien Goetz leads us through the gardens laid out by the father of Impressionism, where we can admire the dazzling planting schemes and successive flowerings that inspired the paintings that now hang in the world's greatest galleries and museums: drifts and avenues of iris, tulips and narcissi, wallflowers, peonies and forget-me-nots, roses and cascades of clematis and wisteria, not forgetting the legendary water lilies.