In this alphabetical guide to landscape paintings, this week’s letter is F for flowers: not those in floral arrangements, but the blooms that contrast with all the greens and earths of the countryside.

Although landscape painters had recognised the colour complements and contrasts generated by flowers, it was perhaps Charles-François Daubigny who was the innovator in his depiction of what was later a popular motif for Impressionists. He painted Fields in the Month of June in 1874, which compares with Monet and de Nittis (below), and later Vincent van Gogh.

Giuseppe De Nittis visited England with James Tissot and Jules Bastien-Lepage in 1882, where he painted these poppies In the Fields around London, adopting Daubigny’s colour contrast into the Impressionist canon.

Alfred Sisley found sufficient blossom on the trees in this glorious panorama of The Terrace at Saint-Germain, Spring, painted soon after he had moved to Marly-le-Roi in 1875.

In some cases, the species of flower is important.

I’m not sure where Mykhaylo Berkos painted these Flax Blooms in 1893; they’re a particularly appropriate theme for an accomplished oil painter, as flax is the source of linseed oil, one of the major drying oils used as a binder in many oil paints, and its fibres can be used for ‘canvas’ too.

Buckwheat was a traditional local crop where the land rises up from the bog of Teufelsmoor, an artists’ colony to the north of Bremen, in Lower Saxony. In Fritz Overbeck’s Buckwheat Fields at Weyerberg from about 1897, he catches a small field of the pseudocereal in full flower, the upper parts light gold in the light of the setting sun. Buckwheat isn’t a grass at all, but is more closely related to sorrel and rhubarb, with edible triangular seeds. It thrives on the poor, acid soils in this area, provided they are well-drained, but its cultivation became unusual during the twentieth century.

For Dennis Miller Bunker flowers were an integral part of the country fields he loved to paint. Wild Asters (1889) is a brilliant assembly of different types of mark, from the sinuous curves in the stream to the fine blotches of the aster flowers.

A June Night and Old Jølster Farm (before 1911) is one of more than a dozen paintings Nikolai Astrup made of this farm in the fjords of Norway after about 1902. These were painted early each summer, when in some years there were still the remains of the winter’s snow on the rugged hills behind. Waterfalls cascading down the scarps are still in spate from the melting snow. Astrup painted this view when the blossom was on the trees, and the meadows a patchwork of colour with the first of the summer flowers, brilliant yellow marsh marigolds.

Although the colours of nature can be rich, for variety it’s hard to beat a country garden.

Camille Pissarro painted this large view of one of the gardens in Pontoise: The Garden of Les Mathurins at Pontoise, belonging to the Deraismes Sisters (1876). In fact, the sisters were only renting this large and impressive property, just down the road from where the Pissarros lived, in the Hermitage district of Pontoise. It had formerly been a convent until the French Revolution.

Helen Allingham’s Buckinghamshire house at Penstreet (c 1900) shows a house in the hamlet of Penn Street, which together with Knotty Green and Forty Green surround the village of Penn, near Amersham, in Buckinghamshire, England. This remains a relatively unspoilt part of the Chilterns to the north-west of London.

Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s Farmhouse with Meadow Flowers from 1909 shows a tumbledown thatched cottage somewhere in the Danish countryside, with a young girl at its open door, a farm dog watching from the path behind her, and a rich variety of wild flowers.

Some of the most brilliant uses of the colour of flowers come from the USA.

In about 1911, Julian Onderdonk started painting views featuring the distinctive state flower of Texas: the bluebonnet, a lupin or lupine species. A Hillside of Blue Bonnets – Early Morning, Near San Antonio Texas from 1916 is a fine example.

Also in 1911, Granville Redmond painted this Field of California Poppies, erupting into a richly coloured carpet of California or Golden Poppies, the state flower associated with the Golden State, and the Gold Rush. There are also a few smaller patches of what may be the large-leaved or purple lupine.

Redmond’s Blue Flowers from 1919 is more Impressionist, with small marks of paint building up what appears to be a large area of purple lupines up in the hills.

His Malibu Coast, Spring from about 1929 shows the twenty-one mile beach of this coastal resort thirty miles to the west of central Los Angeles, with golden poppies and purple lupines in full flower. At this time, Malibu was only just starting development, with the small Malibu Colony and a ceramic tile factory that had been funded by May K Rindge, owner of the land at the time.

When Fauvism developed in Europe in the early twentieth century, it was Théo van Rysselberghe whose fields and flowers burst into the most vivid colours.

In his Almond Trees in Blossom (Morning), from 1918, the more delicate pinks of the flowers pale in comparison with his full reds and blues, even down to the blue horse pulling a plough.