A few years ago, I was lucky enough to make a trip to France with my daughter, and while there, we visited Giverny, the village in Normandy where Impressionist painter Claude Monet lived and worked for decades.

We visited Monet’s former home and flower garden, and we walked around his famous water garden. That water garden is featured in dozens of Monet’s most famous masterpieces, which show the trees reflecting in the water, the arched bridge, and of course, the water lilies. It is unbelievably beautiful.

What I hadn’t known, however, was that Monet created this pond. 

In the 1890’s, he acquired land, and after a lot of argument and objections, got permission from the local authorities to divert water from an arm of the River Epte, so that it would run in front of his home. The pond created by this diversion became his famous water garden.

He built that Japanese-inspired wooden footbridge. He planted the wisteria that covers it. He planted the water lilies that cover the surface of the water.

What’s interesting to me is how much effort Monet dedicated to giving himself the conditions in which he wanted to work, and to give himself the inspiration he sought.

I’d assumed that these scenes painted by Monet occurred around him naturally, like the stacks of hay, fields of poppies, or cathedral that are so well known from his work. But that wasn’t the case.

Just as Charles Darwin went to a lot of trouble to create his “Thinking Path” around his country house, so that he could conveniently walk and think several times a day, Claude Monet built the landscape he wished to paint.

For me, this is a good reminder that we shouldn’t assume that the environment in which we find ourselves will supply what we need to do our best work. It may take us a lot of time, energy, and money to shape our own conditions, and that effort may well be worth it.