This French garden inspired some of the world’s most famous paintings

The scene is straight out of a picture book that I pored over as a child, Linnea in Monet’s Garden: a small green bridge, the paint peeling away in parts, spanning over a pond of water lilies. The story of the young girl, around the same age as I was, visiting Claude Monet’s enchanting garden in Giverny captivated me more than any other book in my bedroom growing up on Sydney’s northern beaches.

That bridge – this time in Latour-Marliac.

Unlike Linnea, I haven’t made it north of Paris to Giverny, despite having swapped Sydney for southern France nearly 20 years ago. So this scene, a facsimile of the Japanese bridge Monet painted a dozen or so times, is as close as I’ve come – even if 700 kilometres separate Monet’s village in Normandy with Latour-Marliac, this nursery in Le Temple-sur-Lot, a speck of a village by the Lot River somewhere in the middle of the south-west French culinary triangle of Agen (prunes), Cahors (wine) and Perigueux (foie gras and black truffles).

“Japanese Bridge Over Water Lilies”  by Claude Monet.

The bridge in front of me is clearly inspired by Giverny, but there’s no doubt as I look around what Latour-Marliac gave to Giverny. Water lilies, in a cascade of shades from light yellow to fuchsia. Monet ordered them from here by the dozens, if the hand-scrawled invoice dated May 15, 1894, hanging inside the small museum tucked at the back of the garden is anything to go by.

Water lilies in the gardens at Latour-Marliac.Credit: Alamy

It was a subject the artist would paint nearly 300 times over three decades, including the monumental set of eight panels on display at the Musee de l’Orangerie in Paris and among his works travelling to Melbourne from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for the French impressionism exhibition opening at the NGV International on June 6.

Every one of them was pulled out of curved basins that, on this warm Spring afternoon, are packed with water lilies in bloom and are framed by large terracotta pots typically used to cook the classic southwestern French sausage and bean stew, cassoulet. The nursery continues to supply Giverny, as well as other clients such as Dior, who order a steady source of flowers for a line of water-lily-based cosmetics.

Latour-Marliac had been open for nearly two decades by the time Monet placed that first order. The first water lily nursery in the world, it was named after its founder, Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac, who had found a way to cross the plant and, in doing so, create the first flowers in a colour other than white. In 1889, Latour-Marliac took his collection to the Exposition Universelle in Paris. This gardener from the deep provinces caused a sensation – and attracted the notice of Monet. “If this garden had never existed, the world would never have had Monet’s water lilies,” says one of the staff as I pay the €9 ($16) entrance fee.

Without Latour-Marliac, Monet may never have had his lilies.Credit: Alamy

The site has expanded in the century since Latour-Marliac died in 1911, and is now owned by a French-American businessman and university professor, Robert Sheldon. Rows of rectangular basins dug into the earth, home to a total of 250 varieties of water lilies, fill out land that during Latour-Marliac’s time were fields.

The ponds are also home to eight species of frogs, and it’s their song that provides the soundtrack – and their movements much entertainment – as I walk around the garden after a light lunch of paté and salad under the shade of vine leaves in the on-site restaurant. Beyond the colourful ponds, a path threads through a shaded forest of bamboo, Latour-Marliac’s first horticultural passion.

The nursery opens to visitors at the beginning of May, when the first water lilies burst into bloom, but it’s at its most dazzling between June and September when the tropical water lily ponds, lotus and the Victoria Amazonica, the species with such wide and perfectly formed round leaves they look like floating tarte dishes, flower in a hot and humid greenhouse. It closes again to the public at the end of September.

Victoria Amazonica, grown in the greenhouse.Credit: iStock

Latour-Marliac’s Napoleon-era family residence, a five-minute walk away, is a more evergreen destination in the village. After shuttering like a time capsule not long after he died, the house opened for the first time last summer to the public as the Maison-Musee Latour-Marliac, and still preserves much of its turn-of-the-century feel.

The new owner, landscape architect Thierry Huau, whose workshop is on rue Claude Monet in Giverny, has styled each room like a whimsical cabinet of curiosities to trace how plants have influenced art, using cutting-edge visual technologies to make the narrative pop.

With these two attractions, the unlikely village of Le Temple-sur-Lot has woven itself into the Monet story – and what a delightful chapter it is.

The details

Visit
Latour-Marliac in Le Temple-sur-Lot is open Tuesday-Sunday from May 1 to September 30. Entrance is €9 ($16), children under 12 free. Maison-Musee Latour-Marliac is open daily from May 1 to September 30 and from Friday to Sunday between March 21 and April 30 and October 1 and November 16. Entrance is €8 ($12.50), children under 12 free. See shop.latour-marliac.com; nympheas.info; tourisme-lotetgaronne.com

Stay
In a recently renovated country house and garden on the banks of the Lot river, Domaine La Gazaille de Camille is a charming bed and breakfast in easy reach of both attractions. Rooms from €170 ($298). See domainelagazailledecamille.fr

Fly
Qantas flies direct from Perth to Paris up to four times a week. From Paris Gare de Montparnasse station, it’s a 3.5 hour journey on France’s high-speed TGV network to Agen. See qantas.com; sncf-connect.com

The writer travelled at her own expense.