Washington Winter Show 2023

44 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A simple New England grain- painted pine Windsor bench from the mid-nineteenth century, placed beneath the Rothko, completes the exquisite composition. Bunny Mellon’s collection of rare books and manuscripts, housed in her library’s pickled oak cabinets, was assembled over a lifetime. Collecting was a passion for Bunny Mellon, and the works gave her great pleasure, but they were also enlightening, inspirational and used. The unique walled garden at Oak Spring, with its Mary Potter crab apple arbor and formal greenhouse reflects the many books through which she was inspired. Fluent in French and an ardent Francophile, she used classical French sources to develop her approach to pruning and the creation of espaliers, an area of horticultural practice in which she developed great skill. Louis Claude Noisette’s three volumes of Le Jardin Fruitier (1821) were an early acquisition and were often consulted to guide the planting and management of Oak Spring’s espaliers and cordons. In her home, as in her library, it was Bunny Mellon’s natural proclivity to invite her garden and the natural world into her carefully Oak Spring Garden Library, Old Wing, fireplace and bookcases, west wall, 1997. Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Upperville, Virginia. Fred Conrad, photographer.