Of Gardens. Paula Deitz
of a Great Gardener: Rachel Lambert Mellon
UPPERVILLE, VIRGINIA—“Part of creating is understanding that there is always more to do; nothing is ever completely finished,” says Rachel Lambert Mellon, whose landscape designs grace such varied places as the White House, Jacqueline Onassis's summer home on Martha's Vineyard, and Hubert de Givenchy's chateau, Le Jonchet, in France.
In the same tradition as an earlier landscape designer, Beatrix Farrand, Mellon is one of those inherently talented women, who, though not formally trained, has read her way through the subject and observed and learned in her travels both horticulture and landscape design. Recalling their work together at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library on Boston Harbor, I. M. Pei says, “Mrs. Mellon has the combination of sensitivity and imagery with technical knowledge that you only find among the best professionals.” It was she who suggested for the library grounds the dune grass that now bends in the wind—symbolic of the Cape Cod terrain where the president loved to walk.
This past year Mellon has been occupied overseeing the completion of her own new garden library, a building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes on the grounds of Oak Spring, the farm here, southwest of Washington, where she lives with her husband, Paul Mellon, the art patron and philanthropist. The library houses her extensive collection of botanical and gardening books amassed over the years, which she considers her working library.
Oak Spring, a U-shaped complex of whitewashed buildings with trees espaliered against the walls, is the residence that the Mellons consider “home.” Like their other properties—city houses in New York, Washington, and Paris, country houses in Cape Cod and Antigua—Oak Spring has a distinctive garden, designed by Mrs. Mellon, this one in a series of parterres in the French style. Crab apple trees square off one area, and a single cordon of McIntosh apple trees border the cool beauty of blue-and-white flower beds. Nearby is a vegetable garden planted in perpendicular rows edged in boxwood. The garden slopes gently, and descending on either side is the main house, with the peaked roofs of the linked structures, giving the impression of a small white village.
Settled into a hillside, beyond an orchard, is the new whitewashed field-stone library with the pitched shed roof silhouetted against the sky. In his design, Barnes sought to convey a vernacular farm building in a contemporary geometric form. The entire facade facing southwest is an immense sundial with steel gnomon and strokes. The building includes the main book room, underground stacks, a book-processing room, a kitchen, and a cubical tower, which is Mellon's workroom and where her collection of botanical porcelain will be installed.
Inside, the white walls are awash with light and shadow from strategically placed square windows, one of Barnes's signature motifs. “I wanted a modern exterior with large openings to let the outside in,” Mellon confirms.
Between the library and the main house, a pleached arbor of crab apple trees leads to the double greenhouse where Mellon experiments with unusual and rare plants. Working greenhouses they are, but Mellon has added her touch: the storage shelves of the entryway are concealed by trompe l'oeil doors depicting other shelves arrayed with garden paraphernalia. Not the least of which, hanging on a “hook,” is the riding raincoat from her days at Foxcroft School, which she still wears.
One area of the greenhouse is reserved for her miniature herb trees, a form that she originated thirty years ago in this country. Using rosemary, thyme, myrtle, or santolina, she grows them from small slips. “They are living objects,” she says, “and although they have a medieval quality, they complement a contemporary interior as well.”
Her miniature herb trees sit on trestle tables inside the galleried library where the bookshelves rise to the ceiling. The white linen shades on the window wall blow like sails in the wind, and the patterned floor, a hallmark of every Mellon interior, is a diagonal checkerboard in blue-gray and beige squares that blend with the paving stones of the adjoining library terraces.
Most of the interior fittings have been hand-crafted on the farm to Mellon's specifications. “All the materials relate to the earth: clay tiles, hand-woven linen, and the wood is from our own trees,” she says. The seventy-five-foot-long room, with its white stone walls and juxtaposition of old and new, has the comfort and ease of a spacious living room. Couches upholstered in off-white are scattered with botanical-print pillows from old French fabric. The homespun blue linen covering the desk chair matches the peasant dresses in a Pissarro painting next to it. Even on a gray day, the brilliant yellow of a Mark Rothko painting lights the space.
In her tower workroom, Mellon continues to design landscapes and gardens that take their inspiration from Le Nôtre, as well as from modern artists, paintings by Mondrian and Diebenkorn, and collages by Anne Ryan. Despite her active life, she has always found time to design and feels close to the long tradition established by other women landscape designers.
As a child, Mellon was fascinated by gardens. She watched the landscape man from the Olmsted company in Boston who came down to Princeton to work on the grounds of her family home. Fairy tales, especially those illustrated by Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, were beloved childhood reading. She studied prints in old books of Italian and French gardens and then built miniature ones in wooden boxes incorporating small stone steps, real soil, and tiny topiary trees from sponges, glue, wire, and wood.
“One of the first gardens I did outside the family was for the designer Hattie Carnegie,” said Mellon. “I was twenty-three then, and I went to her salon, but could not afford any of her dresses myself, though I loved them,” she tells the story. “Miss Carnegie suggested I do a garden in exchange for a coat and dress, and so I designed and planted a garden for her.”
Since then, Mellon has created numerous landscapes for private residences and for public projects. In some instances she has received payment, which she donates to a horticultural or medical cause. But most of her clients, frequently her friends, are creative personalities themselves and savor the experience of their collaboration with her.
Looking out the window of her workroom to the Virginia fields stretched out between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Bull Run Mountains, Mellon comments, “My two horizons.” “I always design a landscape with fixed horizons,” she explains, “whether it be mountains or a stone wall around a twenty-foot-square plot.” If there is no set boundary, she will create one. “On the other hand,” she says, “the sky is a free asset in design and nothing unnecessary should be planted that takes away the sky.”
She shapes the terrain and uses trees as sculpture. Trees are the bones of her garden—always systematically pruned, frequently in topiary forms or espaliered against walls—and they become the focal points from which flower, vegetable, and herb beds evolve. She selects indigenous plant material so that her planned landscapes will flourish. And she knows the forms of trees intimately and whether they cast dark shadows or dance like firelight.
On the drawing board now is the landscape design for Jacqueline Onassis's new house on Martha's Vineyard, which includes a grape arbor and an apple orchard of several varieties of apple trees with here and there a gap—”as if a few old trees had died,” Mellon explains. Mrs. Onassis and Mrs. Mellon began their close friendship by working together on the floral decorations for the White House. Mellon, given President Kennedy's suggestion for a ceremonial outdoor space at the White House, designed the now-famous Rose Garden.
Hubert de Givenchy, the designer, refers to his gardens at Le Jonchet in France, which Mellon helped him design, as “a delicate piece of embroidery,” that is, after he heeded her advice to “take out a hundred trees and straighten up the lines.” Now a row of forty linden trees runs the width of his seventeenth-century chateau. In the park she planted lapis-blue scilla underneath a hundred-year-old oak tree, filling in the exact area where the tree casts its summer shadow. When the flowers bloom then in early spring, their blueness is like a memory of that shadow.
For the small garden of the New Jersey home of Charles Ryskamp, director of the Pierpont Morgan Library, she had removed a somber wall of hemlocks around the garden in favor of a low split-cedar fence in order to treat the surrounding properties visually like a unified park. Then she planted a sugar maple that echoed one in a neighbor's yard, thereby extending his horizon to include the tree beyond.
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