Rue Claude Monet, the village street

Giverny is essentially one street. The Rue Claude Monet runs the length of the village along the foot of the hillside, and everything sits on it: the foundation's gate, the Musée des impressionnismes, the old Hôtel Baudy where the American painters lodged in the 1880s, and a run of stone and half-timbered houses whose owners plant their front walls as hard as Monet planted his.

It is the free half of a Giverny session and often the more relaxed one. The lane is narrow, walled on both sides for much of its length, and the walls carry roses, hollyhocks and clematis through the summer — a couple walking away up the lane is a complete frame with nothing else in it.

Morning light comes down the street from the east end and the village is genuinely empty before the gardens open. From mid-morning the coaches arrive and the lane becomes a queue of people walking to the same gate, so the window here is the same one the gardens have, just outside the fence.

The Musée des impressionnismes has its own garden of banded flower planting, open on a separate ticket, and it is far quieter than the foundation. Everything else on the street is private property seen from a public road.