Being Bunny

“Nothing should be noticed,” Bunny Mellon famously decreed. Indeed, she was the master of understated refinement, fetishistic in her fervor to pare away anything extraneous, inside and out. In her gardens she had an extreme need to prune and pleach.

At Oak Spring Farm, the 4,000-acre estate in Upperville, Virginia, where she created an American Arcadia, every detail was painstakingly wrought, particularly in her crowning achievement, the Garden Library, a modernist shard of whitewashed stone set in a rolling field overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains.