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.
Currently she is a consultant to River Farm, the headquarters of the American Horticultural Society on the Potomac. According to the executive vice president, Thomas W. Richards, she has begun “with plantings that give our driveway the appearance of a country road.”
Although each garden or landscape she creates is as distinctive as the person for whom it is designed, Mellon envisions them all as one immense garden of her own. And where are the horizons of this garden? As far, indeed, as her imaginative inner eye can see.
New York Times, June 3, 1982
“Make the Land Work for You”: Russell Page in America
In the United States a limited and provincial European culture was already outdated a hundred years ago by the rapid growth of a new people in a new continent. Now styles from all over the world chase each other through the American scene, to be tried, accepted, modified and then discarded.
—Russell Page, The Education of a Gardener
WHEN RUSSELL PAGE began his travels to the New World, he brought with he mental images and experiences already accumulated in a lifetime of planting and design. Once in America, he found fresh challenges and a variety of opportunities that spanned the public and private sector and that also introduced him to an intriguing array of new plant materials—and new friends. Like an itinerant salesman or a magician with a bag of tricks, he had ingenious solutions to offer from abroad; but at the same time, he embarked on an important learning process that remained in force until his death in 1985.
Page's commute to America commenced in the fifties in the years before publishing his book, The Education of a Gardener Among the more than twenty-five gardens and landscapes he designed in the United States only a handful remained as unrealized projects. In viewing drawings of this latter group in his archives at the Kalmthout Arboretum in Belgium, one realizes how his ideas on a grand scale would have permanently changed the face of many American institutions. For example, in 1966, at the behest of Mrs. Vincent Astor, he made a Beaux-Arts elevation sketch in pencil of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art embellished with elm trees and lawns, low ilex hedges, and magnolia trees surrounding spouting fountains. A railing detail of a bronze owl was modeled on an Athenian coin from 400 to 500 b.c. By the next year, the museum's director, Thomas Hoving, launched the proposal for the Metropolitan's master plan, and Page's gardenesque Fifth Avenue facade disappeared into oblivion.
Years before he advised Mrs. Albert Lasker on her gardens in Greenwich, Connecticut, she asked him to draw a new fountain to be placed at the end of the Central Park Mall in New York. The result in 1969 was a simplified version of a fantasy fountain from Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, with pink plastic parts that would have added a delicious touch of humor to the park. And, near the end of President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration in 1968, Page proposed a National Rose Garden for Washington, D.C.'s West Potomac Park, with three hundred geometrically shaped planting beds and over a hundred thousand roses, that would have been a major contribution to Lady Bird Johnson's movement to beautify the cities of America. In all of these projects from the sixties, Russell Page was ahead of American planners in his thinking about civic landscapes, but fortunately he remained on the scene into the next decades and the revival of interest in greening American cities.
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