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Dahlias thrust their colours skywards; hollyhocks frame a child at play; peasants tend cabbages; water lilies dot the surface of a pond. The “impressionist garden” captures all of these moments and more.

But why were Monet, Renoir, Morisot, Pissarro and their colleagues so attracted to gardens? It’s a subject I sought to answer in my book In the Gardens of Impressionism.

One answer lies in the sheer ubiquity and sensory intensity of gardens by the second half of the 19th century, when impressionism came into being. Social change that made leisure gardens accessible to all (no longer just kings and aristocrats) combined with “the great horticultural movement” – the introduction of new and exotic plants, trees and flowers as a result of imperial expansion, international trade and developments in technology.

“Ward cases”, named after their British inventor, botanist Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, facilitated the transportation of live plants across the world. Glass and iron construction gave rise to greenhouses that allowed exotic and tender plants to be overwintered. New understanding of hybridisation, fuelled by Charles Darwin’s discoveries, made flowers ever bigger, more scented or overtly decorative, while also boosting commercial vegetable growing.

Gardens, in short, were central to the “modern life” that the impressionists radically pursued – answering powerfully their desire to capture the sensations of the present moment in spontaneous brushwork and vibrant palette.

Green lungs

In Paris, the new parks introduced by Napoleon III from the 1850s were essential to public hygiene: green lungs above ground complementing the new sewer-arteries below ground, as part of France’s fight against cholera.

The city’s trees and lavish corbeilles (floral display beds) were also undeniably alluring. Yet the impressionists’ response was highly selective and often trod a delicate balance between the old and new.

Édouard Manet subversively chose an old park, the Tuileries Gardens, for his pioneering depiction of modern life in 1863. Its fashionable figures listening to an off-scene band recede into a mass of trees that seems more like primal forest than cultivated green space.

And Pierre-Auguste Renoir recalled in old age how, before the modern tree-lined boulevards, manicured squares and English-style parks, there was “behind every house … a garden … Plenty of people still knew the pleasure of eating freshly-picked lettuce.”

Evicted in childhood to make way for the “new Paris”, Renoir had reason for his regret. Already in 1867, he had naughtily plonked a not-yet-in-bloom corbeille in the foreground of his painting of the Champs-Élysées. Napoleon’s prefect Baron Haussmann’s famous “bedding out” regime, intended to ensure continuous floral colour, here experiences an embarrassing glitch.

In 1875, Renoir made an old, overgrown garden in Montmartre, full of “poppies, convolvulus and daisies”, the subject of Woman with a Parasol in a Garden, in which nature seems to return to its original, uncultivated state.

Claude Monet likewise eschewed the arterial path newly driven through the Parc Monceau, capturing instead the play of light and shade on figures chatting under tall trees in a secluded corner of the former aristocratic garden appropriated by Haussmann for public use and speculative building.

It was, rather, in his private gardens at Argenteuil in the 1870s that Monet seemed – at least to some extent – to have echoed Haussmannian horticulture, by cultivating display beds and trying out new flowers. But even here, in the 1873 painting The Artist’s Garden in Argenteuil, his novelty giant dahlias surge across the picture surface like some colourful, organic riptide.

The private garden

If the impressionist garden was both outdoor studio and motif, what strikes the viewer in images like this is the evocation of what art experts nowadays call an attachment environment – a place imbued with personal significance, because it was cultivated by the artist himself.

Monet often inscribed his wife and young son within his Argenteuil artist’s garden. These paintings project familial pride and even hope for national renewal.

After the horror of the Franco-Prussian war and Paris Commune of 1870-1, when Monet and Camille Pissarro had taken refuge with their young families in London, the very act of growing a garden was inherently symbolic. It was a celebration of French soil following the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany.

Pissarro’s multiple depictions of kitchen gardens near his home at Pontoise, meanwhile, asserted his utopian socialist vision of a better future based on working off the land – just as Berthe Morisot’s airily brushed images conflate the growth of her young child with that of cultivated nature.

Such images suggest that, for all their modernity, the impressionists shared the nostalgia for rural existence that accompanied urban expansion and industrialisation.

At rural Vétheuil, where he lived from 1879-81, Monet planted sunflowers almost obsessively in his steep, terraced garden overlooking the Seine. Their late-summer gold and yellow seems almost elegiac after Monet’s wife Camille’s tragic death in 187.

Monet’s most ambitious garden was in turn at Giverny in Normandy, his near-sole painting motif for the last third of his life.

The new, scented and coloured hybrid water lilies he grew there were showpieces of modern horticultural invention – yet his serial paintings of his pond, capturing successive effects of light and atmosphere, construct a profoundly poetic vision of nature as a perpetually unfolding harmony. Coordinates disappear leaving only water, flowers and the reflected sky; the garden now embraces the cosmic.

It was only logical that Monet used this motif for his Paris Orangerie murals, which he gave to France as a first world war memorial. Water lilies open to the light, defeating darkness.

Though often called precursors of abstraction, the Orangerie’s Water Lilies offer the ultimate logic of the garden as attachment environment – encircling the viewer, placing us physically within the impressionist garden’s better world.

Do you have a favourite impressionist garden painting? Let us know in the comments below.

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Clare Willsdon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.