Since the name of Claude Monet almost inevitably conjures up images of lilies at his Giverny home, it might have been supposed that one of these works would adorn the cover of the catalogue for the Royal Academy’s new blockbuster exhibition, Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse.

But no. Instead we are offered a cascade of colour in the pink, red and gold heads of his Chrysanthemums, painted in 1897 in Giverny and lent for the show by a private collector in Los Angeles.

The work is an important one in the context of the exhibition, being illustrative of the artist’s intense interest in developments in horticulture that for the first time permitted such blazing hues. New types of dahlia also contributed to the startling vividness now achievable in garden displays and, as a consequence, on canvas.

A fascinating article in the catalogue by Clare AP Willsdon, the Professor of the History of Western Art at the University of Glasgow, reminds us, too, that chrysanthemums, being traditionally associated with mourning, could have been painted as an implicit tribute by Monet to his friend and fellow artist Gustave Caillebotte, who had died prematurely two years earlier.

Caillebotte shared his pal’s passion for horticulture, though not the same means to indulge it as Monet who, owing to the saleability of his work, was able to employ as many as eight gardeners at Giverny.

Professor Willsdon points out that the chrysanthemums are the first experiment in the ‘flat’ Japanese composition, with horizons eliminated, that Monet was later to develop during his first intensive project involving the lily pond from 1902 to 1909.

“These landscapes of water and reflected light have become an obsession,” the artist confided to a friend. “It is beyond my old man’s strength; nevertheless I want to express what I feel.”

This was to be a demanding commitment. His failure to achieve what he wanted led him to destroy many canvases, more than 30 in 1907.

When finally exhibited in Paris in 1909 they were judged a triumph, work transcending time and space. As the critic Roger Marx observed – brilliantly, in the opinion of Ann Dumas the Royal Academy’s co-curator of the show: “No more earth, no more sky, no limits now.”

The very familiarity of the pictures no doubt partly explains why one of them was not chosen for the catalogue cover, as was the case 18 years ago when the Royal Academy showed us Monet in the 20th Century.

Among the work displayed then was the central panel of the Water Lilies (Agapanthus) triptych, which was begun, along with other vast lily pond paintings, during the First World War when Monet remained in Giverny despite its proximity to the fighting.

“As for me, I’m staying here all the same,” he said, “and if those savages must kill me, it will be in the middle of my canvases, in front of all of my life’s work.”

Monet survived the war, bequeathing at its end the 22 of his 'Grande Décorations' eventually to find a permanent home, to be marvelled at by all visitors, glued to the walls in Musée de l’Orangerie near the Louvre.

Retrieved from the artist’s studio long after his death in 1926 were the three Agapanthus panels, which went to museums in Cleveland, St Louis and Kansas City.

St Louis’s, which crossed the Atlantic in 1998, is now back again in company with the other two to give the first UK display of the whole group in the final room of the exhibition.

On the way there has been so much to delight. Though Monet, with 35 works on show, is the best-represented artist, there are some 90 other exhibits from such artists as Pierre Bonnard, Emil Nolde, Gustav Klimt, Wassily Kandinsky, Camille Pisarro, John Singer Sargent, Vincent van Gogh , Paul Cézanne, Auguste Renoir and Edouard Vuillard.

Close to home were are offered Alfred Parsons’s Orange Lilies, Broadway, Worcestershire, which was completed abound 1911 in the artistic community centred on the rented home of American artists Edwin Austin Abbey and Frank Millet.

I learned something of activities there in a fascinating talk given by my old friend Robert Mattock, the celebrated Oxfordshire rose grower, during the on form 2014 exhibition of sculpture at Asthall Manor.

On form returns this year from June 12 to July 10. Painting the Modern Garden, sponsored by BNY Mellon, continues till April 20.