In the years leading up to the Revolution of 1789, a grassroots movement was afoot on French soil, primed to render passé formal gardens with their "false look of grandeur." Horticultural practices began to advance more inviting prospects that would welcome park-goers from all walks of life and amateur gardeners to enjoy the privileges of green spaces long kept at bay. Regimented trees, clipped hedges, and straight walkways meant to be admired from the lofty heights of palace balconies would yield to rolling lawns and meandering paths in a spirited emulation of English parks. As the art of landscape design gained ground, so too did the importance of satisfying "personal tastes in our gardens in as much variety and richness as is possible in painting or poetry," ushering in the popularity of the Picturesque and so-called Anglo-Chinois styles, which enlisted the involvement of French artists.

These developments paved the way for public parks and private gardens to flourish in the nineteenth century, when taking time to smell the roses—and to plant them in backyard plots—became national pastimes. The quickening pace of worldwide explorations met by enterprising nurserymen would place a delectable variety of roses and other alluring, ever newer and rarer flowers and plants at hand. Empress Josephine Bonaparte, first wife of Napoleon I (r. 1804–14/15), played a key role: she made her glasshouse at Malmaison, just northwest of Paris, a famous hub for the collection and cultivation of exotic flora, putting France on the map when it came to floriculture and giving new meaning to the phrase "flower power."

The nineteenth century was the great age of public parks, not least in France, where they assumed pride of place in the overarching redesign of the nation's capital. In the wake of the French Revolution, royal gardens and hunting grounds in and around Paris were at last opened to the masses. Then the Industrial Revolution intervened to fast-track the development of "verdant green spaces that dispense health . . . [and] offer workers and their families places for rest and pleasure" in a city where factory-blighted and crammed quarters had become a breeding ground for disease and dissent. At the initiative of Napoleon III (r. 1852–70), Baron Haussmann commandeered these words into action. He carried out an urban renewal plan that increased green space a hundredfold and resulted in the citywide distribution of some thirty parks and neighborhood squares along a network of leafy boulevards, which brought essential services to a rapidly expanding population—all in less than two decades.

Naturalism triumphed. Painters of the Barbizon school and the first generation of photographers took to the woods, claiming as their open-air studio the 40,000-acre forest of Fontainebleau, just south of Paris, that had once been the exclusive haunt of privileged huntsmen. Later in the century, the Impressionists circled back to the city, channeling its modern look into light-filled and airy pictures of middle-class Parisians out and about in such former royal and aristocratic pleasure grounds as the Bois de Boulogne or the Parc Monceau. Inevitably, young upstarts like Georges Seurat entered the fray, challenging the old guard on their own turf, as France played host to innovative movements—both artistic and green—that brought public parks into the picture.

From Monet, who once confessed that he "owed having become a painter to flowers," to Van Gogh, who turned to "painting flowers . . . to render intense color," artists who came of age in the late nineteenth century were prompted to revitalize the art of floral still life, embracing a practice that had commended itself to relatively few in the previous two centuries. In doing so, they infused this fallback for bad weather (and fail-safe for the marketplace) with something of the novel variety assured by horticultural developments. In response to the steady influx of far-flung discoveries, the nursery industry rallied to propagate, hybridize, and distribute plants in an endless array of forms and hues. This led to eye-catching moments at every turn, from winding paths in Parisian parks adorned with flower beds to the doorsteps of private landowners who adopted the current practice of planting blooms near the house. A seasoned journalist noted in 1887, "In no other era have flowers and plants been so widely appreciated; they preside at all our ceremonies, take part in all our festivities; their use has increased a hundredfold in twenty years."

With inspiration enough to go around, flowers sustained the growing interest of both avant-garde and conservative factions. Corresponding with their debut in the Impressionists' ambitious early works of the 1860s and the increased attention they garnered as a vehicle to explore color and abstraction in the 1880s, floral still lifes tripled in number at the official Paris Salons between 1863 (which one critic called a veritable "garden" of pictures) and 1880 (when 159 were shown).

"One of the pronounced characteristics of our present Parisian society," wrote the journalist Eugène Chapus in 1860, "is that . . . everyone in the middle class wants to have his little house with trees, roses, dahlias, his big or little garden." By this date, some thirty years after a big burst of activity on the horticultural front, gardening had become not only fashionable but also—like many pleasurable indulgences with reputed health benefits—the latest craze. Beyond the established horticultural societies, journals, and manuals that championed the practice, a new commercial industry arose to supply the proper tools and accoutrements, from benches to greenhouses. Nurseries and flower markets became active centers of business. With the advent of midcentury train service, Parisians enjoyed easy access to garden plots parceled from rural tracts of land in the newly developed suburbs, while potted plants became a fixture of apartment dwellers' windowsills.

The mania for gardening captured the attention of caricaturists such as Honoré Daumier and novelists such as Gustave Flaubert, who were quick to recognize the growing leisure activity that drew the French out of doors "dressed in blue smocks and wide-brimmed hats, gaiters to their knees." Artists, many of whom were gardeners themselves, naturally gravitated to these backyard retreats, cultivating a more intimate view of nature. Close at hand and divested of grandeur, these landscape subjects invited their personal touch: the kind of homegrown invention that garden culture fostered.

With a refreshing disregard for prior stylistic conventions, the Impressionists presented snapshot glimpses of individuals engaged in everyday activities in familiar contexts, blurring the distinction between portraiture and genre scenes to produce, as Degas put it, "a composition that paints our time." They honed in on pockets of the landscape that celebrated the era's devotion to leisure, focusing their sights on spaces designated—in the blueprint for revamping Paris and its outlying suburbs—for the enjoyment of nature's gifts of light, air, and scenery. As a popular new addition to the middle-class household, backyard gardens played a defining role in picturing modern life as they knew it.

In these congenial outdoor settings, sitters (fellow artists, models, friends, and family members) were inclined to let down their guard, tucking into a book or needlework, while painters eased into the challenge of capturing the look of the moment with a spritely touch and a carefree nonchalance. Attentive to the fleeting qualities of light and passing whims of fashion—or what Charles Baudelaire called "all the pretty little things" that reflect the modernity of an era—artists were apt to gloss over facial features and flesh out their images with stylish straw hats offering shade and flower beds skirting gravel paths. In takeaway impressions of their contemporaries relaxing on the weekend—at home in their "natural habitats"—they brought to light the growing place gardens had claimed in French daily life.