Remembering the Dedication of the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden and Garden Designer Bunny Mellon

April 22, 1965

On this day, the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden was dedicated.

Jackie did not attend the dedication. Her mother attended in her place. The dedication brought tears and smiles.

Jackie helped design the garden - which was to be called the White House East Garden - along with her friend, the horticulturist and gardener Rachel Lambert Mellon, who always went by “Bunny.”

After the assassination of President Kennedy, First Lady Lady Bird Johnson reached out to Bunny to complete the East Garden.

Bunny agreed to do the work on one condition: that the garden be named the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden in honor of her friend, the former First Lady.

The dedication ceremony for the garden was bathed in sunlight. First Lady Johnson gave a speech, saying:

"There could be only one name for this garden."

Jackie was not keen to have the garden named in her honor.

Both the Rose Garden and the East Garden had been John’s ideas.

After Lady Bird persisted, Jackie finally relented but asked that the naming be downplayed and placed inconspicuously on a bench in the garden.

There is a bench in the garden - a Lutyens bench - designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens ("Lutchins"). This bench is an iconic feature of many gardens.

The bench was placed next to the grape arbor, and on one of the posts for the grape arbor, there is an elegant, small, silver plaque - 2.5 inches square. The font for the plaque is Bunny’s own handwriting - and it says,

"This garden is dedicated to Jacqueline Kennedy with great affection by those who worked with her in the White House, April 22, 1965." 

In appreciation for Bunny’s work, Jackie gifted Bunny a large folio-sized scrapbook tracing the work on both the Rose Garden and the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden.

A self-taught gardener and designer, Bunny kept the book in her magnificent personal garden Library at her Oak Hill estate in Upperville, Virginia.

In fact, the basketweave brick hardscaping in the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden is a replica of Bunny’s paving at Oak Spring. To make the surface permeable, Bunny ensured that no mortar touched the bricks.

In the weeks following the dedication, a little story about Bunny’s time designing the White House gardens began circulating through newspapers.

The Morning Call out of Paterson, New Jersey, reported that,

Robert Kennedy… recalled the day that Bunny Mellon’s garden hoe cut the White House communication link with the outside world.

Mrs. Mellon did a lot of the actual spading and planting herself, Senator Kennedy noted,

“Often, during Cabinet meetings, we would see her out there in the rose garden - a little figure with a bandana around her head," he said.

One day, he recalled, there was complete consternation. Mrs. Mellon's hoe had cut right through a buried cable that connected the President of the United States with key spots around the world.

Immediately after that, a long-planned improvement and modernization of White House communication equipment was hastily commenced... Cables were moved out of the Rose garden, into another area of the grounds, and deeply buried in a vault-like structure, secure from any future woman with a hoe.

President Kennedy, who had not previously paid much attention to yards and gardens, became intensely interested in the appearance of the White House grounds and devoted a lot of thought to improving them, Robert Kennedy recalls, even in times of great crisis, "John Kennedy found time for his gardens." 

JFK learned the names of most of the species and proudly reeled them off to visitors as he showed them around.

President Kennedy actually had a lot more to do with the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, which is to be used by First Ladies and their children, than did Mrs. Kennedy. It was a consciousness of this that made the gentle Jacqueline Kennedy very reluctant to have the garden bear her name.

The new garden is an interesting contrast to the rose garden. Whereas the latter is strong and bold, with large clusters of brilliantly hued tulips, marching lines of flowering crabapple trees, and beds laid out in strong diagonal lines. The Jacqueline Kennedy Garden was deliberately planned by Mrs. Mellon to be a gentle garden.

Tulips are widely scattered and are in shades of white, yellow, and soft orange. Bed outlines are circular rather than diagonal.

This is the first time, incidentally, that an area in or around the White House ever has been named for a First Lady. The White House curator office says it can find no record that any other First Lady was so honored.

There are not many things around the mansion named after Presidents, in fact. The only present exception is the Lincoln Room.