Rachel (Bunny) Lambert Mellon (1910 – 2014)

Horst P. Horst

Bunny Mellon was a garden designer, philanthropist and art collector.  She was considered an authority on American horticulture and created a major private collection of rare books and manuscripts in the history of botany, botanical illustration, garden and landscape design.  

She was born into a wealthy pharmaceutical family (her grandfather invented ‘Listerine’) and from a very early age was gardening, possibly inspired by the Olmstead Brothers who had been employed to manage the family gardens. In 1948 she married her equally wealthy second husband, Paul Mellon the great art collector and philanthropist, and together they made a home at Oak Springs Farm, a 4,000 acre estate in Virginia with its own airstrip (whilst also maintaining several other properties).

She was entirely self-taught and whilst creating the garden at Oak Springs Farm she met Jacqueline Kennedy and was later invited to redesign the Rose Garden and then the Eastern Garden at the White House.  Further commissions followed and in 1987 she was awarded the RHS Veitch Memorial Medal.  The garden designer Lanning Roper called her ‘the leading landscape genius in America’. She mixed styles and broke rules, particularly in her garden at Oak Springs where French formality met English cottage met wildflowers and hedgerows.  Her ethos was that nothing should be noticed, and each plant should complement each other.

She was particularly fond of topiarised and standard woody herbs (such as rosemary, santolina, thyme and myrtle), which she called her ‘standing herb trees’, and which had been inspired by the mediaeval manuscripts she was collecting.  They were kept in every room in her several houses and changed every two weeks for fresh ones grown at Oak Springs.

She was great friends with the French couturier Givenchy and helped to design the gardens at his Chateau. When Givenchy later became president of the World Monuments Fund in France she also contributed to the restoration of the potager du Roi (Louis XIV's kitchen garden) in Versailles.

Bunny Mellon had a passion for learning and collecting, and her proudest achievement was the Oak Spring Garden Library. Four catalogues have been published (Sylva, Pomona, Flora and Herbaria, which are all available online here), and the library itself is open to scholars.  She created a Foundation whose ‘mission is to support and inspire fresh thinking and bold action on the history and future of plants, including the art and culture of plants, gardens and landscapes’. 

Arbour of pleached crab apples at Oak Springs, Vanity Fair.

She also created the Gerard B Lambert Foundation (named in honour of her father) which has recently donated a $1 million grant to The Institute of Classical Architecture and Art to fund the Bunny Mellon programme in landscape architecture.  The grant honours ‘her commitment to landscape design, and her deeply-held belief that architecture is firmly linked to its surrounding landscape’ and includes provision for an international landscape design competition (see here).

Bunny Mellon had made provision that after her death her (vast) assets (including much of her property at Oak Springs) be sold to continue her legacy. The Sotheby’s auction in New York realised  $218 million which will continue to provide for the preservation of her library and the continuation of her Foundation.