Garden Secrets of Bunny Mellon

By Linda Jane Holden, Bryan Huffman, Lloyd Thomas and P. Allen Smith

A treasure trove of Bunny Mellon’s garden design philosophy and advice from her personal archive.

Garden Secrets of Bunny Mellon is for anyone who has enjoyed time spent in a garden, from aspiring garden makers to those who manage large estates. This collection is comprised of extracts from Bunny’s own writings and garden notes, as well as photographs and drawings from her archive.

Chapters are organized by Atmosphere (sky, horizon, shadows), Climate, Light, Space, Shape, Maintenance, and more―readers will feel as if Bunny Mellon has come alongside as a gardening guide and friend.

Bunny Mellon was of the affluent class and mingled along with her husband, Paul Mellon, in the circles of the East Coast gentry of the Kennedy and Reagan eras. But Mrs. Mellon, as she was respectfully called by those professional gardeners who worked with her most, wasn’t snooty about social position or afraid to get her hands dirty in the rich soil of her family’s Virginia farm. Beyond this, Bunny Mellon was known nationally and internationally as a style icon of her time, enjoying friendships with Givenchy, the Kennedys, and the like. Her personal passion was for design, and that was exhibited in her fashion and her garden.

A late acquaintance, Linda Holden learned that Bunny wanted to write a gardening book but never found the time. Searching the family’s archive after Mrs. Mellon’s death, the editors―whom all shared personal relationships with Bunny―discovered a trove of photographs, illustrations, and writings and have now turned it into the how-to gardening book Bunny had hoped to write.

Linda Jane Holden was a trusted friend of Bunny Mellon. She authored The Gardens of Bunny Mellon (October 2018). She lives in Chantilly, VA.

Thomas Lloyd, grandson of Bunny Mellon, is president of the Gerard B. Lambert Foundation, established by Bunny Mellon to honor her father. Lloyd lives in Washington, DC.

Bryan Huffman, an interior designer based in Monroe, NC, was a close friend of Mrs. Mellon for ten years.

P. Allen Smith is the TV host of P. Allen Smiths Garden Home and P. Allen Smith’s Garden to Table.  He is a garden designer, conservationist, and lifestyle expert.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gibbs Smith
• Release date: Feb 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781423655411

Book preview

9781423655404.jpg

Garden Secrets

of Bunny Mellon

Linda Jane Holden, Thomas Lloyd, and Bryan Huffman

Foreword by P. Allen Smith

Photo of logo.Illustration of tree.

Illustration by Bunny Mellon, © Thomas Lloyd, Gerard B. Lambert Foundation.

Photo of Bunny sitting outdoors.

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

rachel lambert mellon’s StorY

The Kennedy Rose Garden Unfolds

BunnY’s Garden Standards

Planning and Measuring for Your Garden

Atmosphere

Light and Shadow

Space

Insights on Insects

The Importance of Trees

Flowers and edibles

BunnY’s Little Herb Trees

In summarY

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Illustration of plant.

Illustration by Bunny Mellon, © Thomas Lloyd, Gerard B. Lambert Foundation.

Foreword

P. Allen Smith

Creating a garden is a personal expression. One can tell much about the deeper makeup of a person by the gardens they create. Bunny Mellon was an extraordinary person in many ways. A person of great style, taste, all set within a full life of privilege, but with a love of the garden that grounded and shaped her throughout her life. I think the garden has a way of doing just that, doesn’t it? Bunny learned early on that for those interested in gardens, nature would always meet you at least halfway. And, on that journey much about life—and oneself—can be discerned.

The collaboration between Linda Jane Holden, Bryan Huffman and Thomas Lloyd in Garden Secrets of Bunny Mellon is an important one, offering rare insights and lessons from the reserved Mellon. Although deeply private, Mellon was known as a great design talent and one of the 20th century’s most celebrated style icons. Indeed, Mrs. Mellon and Mrs. Mellon’s gardens continue to inspire today. Garden Secrets of Bunny Mellon offers us direct access to Mrs. Mellon’s gardening passion, her process and her predilections vis-à-vis careful curation of her personal writings and photographs. This assembly has been attentively orchestrated by three personalities intimately familiar with her habits and design formulations. Each collaborator knew Bunny and her strong affection for garden design, each with a unique perspective to share.

Linda met Mrs. Mellon herself at Oak Spring, the Mellon family farm in Upperville, VA (a property with gardens I have long admired), when she went there to talk about gardening at the White House. What a conversation that must have been; and what incredible scholarship Linda was gifted, with direct guidance from Mrs. Mellon from her Oak Spring library—the very texts that Mrs. Mellon called upon to refine her own aesthetic and design technique.

Family and friends were a wellspring of warmth and joy for Mrs. Mellon, notably with her grandson Thomas Lloyd and, later in her life, with devoted personal friend and designer Bryan Huffman. From these gentlemen, we benefit from the perspective of kinship and kinship extended. Mr. Lloyd graciously navigated the Mellons’ private collection and provided (much never previously made public) details of Bunny’s private life, as well as his own loving recollections of Mrs. Mellon’s work on family properties.

Kissing Cousin is the affectionate nickname Bunny had for Bryan. Southerners know this as a moniker reserved for the warmest of friends with whom secrets and thoughts are shared. As a friend of Bryan myself, I understand why he and Bunny became quick companions. I first met Bryan Huffman in his native North Carolina during a private party hosted by philanthropist and preservationist Tom Gray. Tom’s notoriously well-preserved Philip Hoehns (now Hanes) home in Clemmons was the perfect background for a collection of design experts descending on historic Salem for the symposium of Early Southern Decorative Arts in 2018, of which I was the keynote speaker. Bryan shared with me then his love of the garden, design, and spirit of generosity. His close friendship with Bunny near the end of her life was filled with daily talks about design, projects, art, politics, gardens, and travel. Through these exchanges, Bryan became a steward of Bunny’s mature and reflective design values, as well as her most memorable and personally rewarding design experiences. As Bryan testified to me, It doesn’t matter if one is in Virginia, Nantucket, Antigua or Paris—Bunny’s style was Bunny’s, her style is always identifiable and it is her own.

As an American whose own design ethos developed in Europe, I have a great admiration for Bunny’s grounded approach to garden design and love of horticulture. And I also identify with her joy for experimentation and expression that were exercised at her many properties, just as I have at my Arkansas home, Moss Mountain Farm. She liberally borrowed from both the jardin à la française and jardin à l’anglais schools and rendered product with a distinct American accent.

During my formal education in England as a young man, I befriended similarly strong female tastemakers who contributed significantly to the landscape—Debo Duchess of Devonshire at Chatsworth, Nancy Lancaster at Little Haseley, and Viscountess Ashbrook at Arley, amongst others. Women such as Bunny from this postwar era were stylish, yet pragmatic. Imbued with a Jeffersonian spirit of a love of beauty, nature and functionality, Bunny crafted gardens that worked with nature, not against it. Meadow grasses and wildflowers allowed to go ungroomed in their natural state juxtaposed with more formal elements celebrated the art of the garden—and always with a bow to Nature herself.

Linda, Thomas and Bryan are to be applauded for their tireless work distilling Bunny’s personal views and gardening techniques. Collecting these insights preserves skilled practical knowledge and cultural information of an important era in American gardening for everyone to access for generations to come.

The best gardeners are those with a long history in the garden and soil on their hands. Bunny was certainly both.

Preface

It was June 2010, and I had resumed previous talks about gardens with the White House gardener, Irvin Williams, whom I knew when I worked at the White House and who had recently retired. We were delving into the history of the Rose Garden. I mailed a letter to the Oak Spring Garden librarian requesting permission to view Mrs. Mellon’s Rose Garden archives and he had responded by saying that Mrs. Mellon wanted to see me to discuss gardening at the White House when I came to Oak Spring, the Mellon family farm in Upperville, Virginia.

On the day of the visit, Bunny Mellon and I sat down together at a round table in her garden library in front of an immense and equally sunny Rothko painting that seemed to light up the space all around her. Straightaway she asked, Linda, you worked in the White House. Which president did you work for? Knowing of her friendship with the Kennedys, I suspected my honest reply would bring a hasty conclusion to our conversation and I would soon be