Linnea in Monet's Garden [antikvár]

1 J. ' ust think — I've been in a famous artist's garden! And I've been in Paris! My friend Mr. Bloom was with me. In fact, the whole thing was actually his idea. But maybe I should begin at the beginning. I love flowers (I'm even named after a flower), and I'm interested in everything that grows. That's just the jvay I am. And that's how Mr. Bloom is, too. He's my upstairs neighbor. Mr. Bloom used to be a gardener. He's retired now, which is good because it means he has lots of time to spend with me. Mr. Bloom knows just about everything there is to know about plants. It seems like that, anyway. When I go to visit him, I like to look in a book that Mr. Bloom has about the French artist Claude Monet. Monet loved flowers, too. He painted lots of pictures of them. Probably his best known flower paintings are his pictures of water lilies. There are reproductions of Monet's paintings in Mr. Bloom's book, and old photographs of the artist, his wife Alice and all eight children. There are also pictures of their garden and the big pink house where they lived over a hundred years ago. The longer Monet lived there, the more beautiful the garden became. He planted more and more flowers. Later he used the garden in his paintings. He even had a pond put into the garden, so that he could have water lilies to paint.