Make Your Garden Look Like A French Countryside With Colors That Look Like A Painting

The French countryside is filled with beautiful gardens, trimmed, symmetrical, and overflowing with lavender bushes, but few are as iconic and revered as late Impressionist painter, Claude Monet's. Nestled in the pretty village of Giverny, located just a 45-minute train ride from central Paris, Monet's former home is quite literally something out of one of his paintings. While the house itself is stunning, a charming ivy-clad French country home painted in soft pink with green shutters, it's his colorful gardens that inspired so many of his famous artworks that tourists flock here in their droves to see.

Spread across 2.5 acres, Monet's gardens are split into two distinct spaces: The Walled Normandy Garden and The Water Garden. In late spring and summer, the walled garden bursts to life with vibrant yellow, pink, red, and blue blooms lining its gravel walkways. Meanwhile, the Japanese-inspired water garden, famous for its arched bridge and lily ponds, which inspired Monet's "Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies" artworks, offers a softer touch, with its muted blues, pinks, greens, and purples. These thoughtful combinations of color and texture define the romantic French garden aesthetic, and with the right plant choices, it's surprisingly easy to replicate Claude Monet's French Giverny garden at home.

To create a color palette worthy of a French countryside garden, you first need to think like a painter. With Monet's gardens, the Impressionist approached planting with a painter's eye, carefully considering how colors would complement one another, how they could create a sense of depth, and how each hue would interact with the changing light throughout the day.

With this in mind, consider vibrant colors like reds, oranges, yellows, and hot pinks for central, sunnier areas of your garden, or any bold tones that will hold up well in direct sunlight. Think: layered coral tulips with scarlet red poppies and bright yellow doronicums next to orange pansies. Around the edges of your garden, or in more shaded areas of your yard, opt for a softer palette of cool blues, purples, and greens. In these areas, Monet favored soft blue clematis, gentle lavender sweet peas, and powder-blue forget-me-nots.

Another thing to consider when choosing the colors for your French countryside-inspired garden is how to layer your plants so they flow naturally into structured tiers. You could start with tall, dramatic blooms at the back, such as blue and purple delphiniums, violet irises, and dark pink hollyhocks, followed by mid-height plants in blush pink peonies, lilac foxglove, and peach-hued roses.

The front of the flower bed is where you can choose to have your bright colors for more drama, and vivid spring bulbs will work well for this, or opt to stick to the muted color tones with dusty pink and light peach blooms, or add some silvery foliage like lamb's ear to contrast the bright colors. Keep in mind that it's best to complement the colors rather than contrast, as this is what allows French country landscape designs to look like real-life paintings.