Bunny Mellon: The Garden Sorceress Behind the White House Rose Garden
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
August 9, 1910
Today is the birthday of Rachel Lowe Lambert Lloyd Mellon, also known as Bunny Mellon, my dear garden confidantes.
Like a rare bloom appearing unexpectedly in one's carefully tended perennial bed, Bunny graced this world with her presence and left an indelible mark on garden design that continues to inspire us today.
She received her charming sobriquet "Bunny" from a family nurse - a name that would follow her through the grand estates and magnificent gardens she would later create. Such simple beginnings for a woman who would reshape America's most prestigious landscape!
Bunny's earliest memory, shared in the preface of one of her books, reveals the genesis of her lifelong passion. The darling woman wrote that she remembered,
"... being very small near a bed of tall, white, phlox in my godmothers garden.
This towering forest of scent and white flowers was the beginning of ceaseless and trust, passion, and pleasure in gardens and books."
One can almost smell those intoxicating white phlox, can't you, my fellow soil-dwellers?
How many of us can trace our own garden obsessions to similar childhood enchantments?
Bunny's greatest passion was garden design, a pursuit she elevated to an art form with her impeccable eye and understanding of space and harmony. Her true celebrity bloomed after designing the White House Rose Garden - a masterpiece of restraint and elegance that continues to frame presidential moments to this day.
She cultivated not only gardens but meaningful friendships, including her close relationship with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Oh, to have been a butterfly on the wall during their garden conversations!
At the tender age of 23, Bunny created one of her first gardens for clothing designer Hattie Carnegie. Not only did she design this verdant sanctuary, but she planted it with her own hands - a true gardener at heart! In exchange for this living artwork, Carnegie bestowed upon her a coat and dress from her salon.
What a delightful barter, don't you think, my horticultural sweethearts?
A woman after my own heart, Bunny cherished books with the same fervor she did her beloved plants. She amassed a magnificent collection of rare garden books, manuscripts, and botanical prints that informed and inspired her distinctive style.
In fact, my darling garden companions, Bunny credited these literary treasures for inspiring her designs. She confessed,
"my beginning, started with rare books on plants and garden plants, mostly French or Italian. They were like my Bibles."
How many of us have dog-eared garden books beside our beds, their pages smudged with the occasional trace of soil from eager fingers?
Bunny's devotion to learning reminds us that the greatest gardens spring not only from the earth but from the mind and heart cultivated through knowledge and passion.
As we tend our own modest plots today, let us remember Bunny Mellon's legacy - a woman who understood that gardens are not merely collections of plants but expressions of our deepest selves, our histories, and our dreams for beauty in this world.
