The Gardens of Bunny Mellon

by Linda Jane Holden, Roger Foley (Photographer), Peter Crane (Introduction)

Overview

Throughout her long and storied life, Rachel “Bunny” Mellon’s greatest passion was garden design. She and her husband, Paul Mellon, one of the wealthiest men in America, maintained homes in New York, Cape Cod, Nantucket, Antigua, and Upperville, Virginia, and she designed the gardens at all of them. She also designed gardens for some of her dearest friends, including the Rose Garden and the East Garden at the White House, at the request of President Kennedy, and the gardens at both the Paris home and the château of couturier Hubert de Givenchy. All of these gardens are featured in The Gardens of Bunny Mellon, illustrated with Mellon’s own garden plans, sketches, and watercolors, as well as with archival photographs and specially commissioned photographs of Oak Spring, the Mellon estate in Upperville. Author Linda Holden’s text is based on extensive interviews with Mellon before her death in 2014.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780865653511
Publisher:	ABRAMS
Publication date:	10/16/2018
Pages:	308
Sales rank:	237,800
Product dimensions:	9.60(w) x 12.20(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Linda Holden is the author of Presidents’ Gardens.Roger Foley is an award-winning garden and landscape photographer. Sir Peter Crane is the inaugural president of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation and former director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Editorial Reviews

"Takes an insider's tour through the legendary tastemaker's influential green spaces."

Veranda

"It could be just one more envy-inducing look at how the 1% live, but instead The Gardens of Bunny Mellon is a tribute to a woman who found her passion in beautiful gardens. . . . The self-taught horticulturist didn't just create beautiful green oases in each of the family homes around the world, she also left her mark on some of the most famous gardens on the planet."

American Express Essentials

"The Gardens of Bunny Mellon reveals the horticulturalist's iconic oases, including her Oak Spring estate in Virginia and the White House Rose Garden."

Martha Stewart Living

"Bunny Mellon was happiest weilding a pair of garden clippers. Even as a child, Mellon was drawn to landscape design. . . . Mellon's ingenious, often underappreciated body of work should be noticed, and this book is a valuable contribution to that end."

Flower Ed

"For admirers of the inimitable style of "Bunny" Mellon, and the innate design flair that took her—without formal training—to the White House and Versailles, the upcoming book, The Gardens of Bunny Mellon, is a tome to treasure."

ArchitecturalDigest.com

"Mellon was the garden design master. She designed not only the gardens at all five of her homes spanning across the East Coast and beyond, but also the Rose Garden at the White House for President Kennedy and the formal and vegetable gardens of Hubert de Givenchy's Chateau du Jonchet. These lavish landscape designs are featured in The Gardens of Bunny Mellon, in addition to her own garden plans, sketches, watercolors and archival photographs."

Beach Modern Luxury

"The Gardens of Bunny Mellon is part guide—with gorgeous photographs by Roger Foley that could make even the least inclined to go hunting for a trowel—part biography, and part social history. Mellon's passion is apparent throughout."

Vogue.com

"Bunny Mellon was happiest weilding a pair of garden clippers. Even as a child, Mellon was drawn to landscape design. . . . Mellon's ingenious, often underappreciated body of work should be noticed, and this book is a valuable contribution to that end."

Flower

"Bunny Mellon was happiest weilding a pair of garden clippers. Even as a child, Mellon was drawn to landscape design. . . . Mellon's ingenious, often underappreciated body of work should be noticed, and this book is a valuable contribution to that end."

Flower

"Takes an insider's tour through the legendary tastemaker's influential green spaces."

Veranda

"The Gardens of Bunny Mellon reveals the horticulturalist's iconic oases, including her Oak Spring estate in Virginia and the White House Rose Garden."

Martha Stewart Living Magazine Editors

Winter 2018

The name "Mellon" most likely conjures thoughts of finance, art, and philanthropy. Author Holden (Presidents' Gardens) adds gardening to the list. From childhood, Rachel "Bunny" Mellon (1910–2014) found opportunities to create and plant gardens at a succession of houses, estates, and, finally, national places. She was an avid collector of horticultural writings and art, and with Jeffersonian attention to detail, cataloged the sowing, germinating, and growth cycles of plants; her library is a story in itself. The Mellons owned houses in many diverse locations. Their Virginia estate, Oak Spring, occupies most of the pictorial and narrative space in this book, which presents a tour of both the buildings and the grounds, the garden plans and plantings forming an environmental whole that reflects Mellon's refined aesthetic that "nothing should be noticed; nothing obvious." Of note are the historically significant and personal designs for the White House Rose Garden, the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, the John F. Kennedy gravesite, and the Kennedy Presidential Library. VERDICT For estate and private garden collections, this large, richly photographed volume returns the investment, showcasing a variety of spaces designed with a singular restrained perfection.—Jeanette McVeigh, formerly Univ. of the Sciences, Philadelphia

Library Journal