"[B]inary opposites fit nicely the formulation of history as written, but they do little to capture the messy, inchoate reality of history as lived."

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Gertrude Jekyll, like Monet, was a painter with poor eyesight, and their gardens - his at Giverny in the Seine valley, hers in Surrey - had resemblance's that may have sprung from this condition. Both loved plants that foamed and frothed over walls and pergolas, spread in tides beneath trees; both saw flowers in islands of colored light - an image the normal eye captures only by squinting.

— Eleanor Perenyi