Love Your Garden, Love Yourself

Lessons from the Bunny Mellon School of Gardening

…Blessedly aslant … through a curtain of green…

……Scars left on the land, and on our hearts …

………History and memory … are not the same…

I’m reading through slips of paper recorded back in April, from my time “Writing the Landscape” at Oak Spring, the beautifully preserved home of Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon, BFF of Jackie O and gardening and design guru to not one but two presidential spouses among many others. And I’m remembering …

Scratch notes from my time at Oak Spring. I’ve long been a fan of graph paper. ;-)

The nine of us there, spread out among former stables, guest cottages, and the occasional (and much coveted) posting in the House itself, gathered around a table in the Apple House to perform a final task: the preparation of a gift.

Little slips of paper. A basket of words and phrases we’d heard each other utter in the magical landscape of Oak Spring Farm—and not just any words, the gems. The truly lapidary phrases, elegant and concise, suitable for painting on a leaf or carving in jade, the words that spoke to souls.

I snapped this outbuilding at Rokeby, the estate’s organic farm, because I love the espalier. Turns out so did Bunny. That French potager style and the tools and techniques on which it was founded were fundamental to Bunny’s style.

Each of us prepared one slip for the others—as a memento of our time together, as encouragement to keep going—so I have eight slips. This week marked is the first time I’ve read them and it’s fascinating seeing what people heard. The first note was I quoted was from Atlanta Pam (we also had a Virginia Pam).

Sona from Delhi, meanwhile, heard

…struggle to connect…

……seeing and being seen…

………soul survival is soil survival…

Weird that only four months after the fact, I don’t remember writing these words much less reading them aloud to an audience. Gretchen,¹ our workshop sensei, was correct. The slips of paper are indeed a gift amid a midsummer writing drought.

There are moments in time in which it seems we’re capable of making great leaps forward in perception. I certainly experienced something that felt a lot like growth at Bunny Mellon’s little Eden.

Root magic … two-stepping … sears holes … soils … souls… (Amanda, Florida)

Images from the cutting garden at Rokeby and the formal garden at Oak Spring. A crabapple allee leads to a glass house filled with topiary. Spaces to rest and refresh are everywhere, like this seat in one of the formal garden's "rooms." The rare books that inspired Bunny are collected in her library.

Such an intense experience in that valley setting between Bull Run and the Blue Ridge mountains. For me, there’s usually a long period of digestion after so much ingestion. Not this time. I came back more in love with my garden than I was before.

Now that might seem counterintuitive. Surely an encounter with an amazing garden would evoke feelings of … inadequacy? even hopelessness? But no. It made me realize instead that I’ve spent far too much time in the garden being … dissatisfied.

… Blue bottle … scars … half truth… soil and soul… (Andi, Kansas)

How often has my self-talk gone something like this? Dang it! That expensive seed from the crunchy garden catalog was a complete dud. Zero germination. Outrageous. Or like this? Dang it! I was just getting caught up on the weeding. Three days straight of rain and they’re out of control again. Or any of a hundred other complaints. How many times have I simply groaned and averted my eyes because of the perception that there was just so much left to do?

Seriously. I’m always finding something to whine about even though I know from personal experience and the collective wisdom of every authority I’ve ever consulted that one’s garden is never “finished”—it’s always in a process of becoming. That is what, in fact, makes gardening such an apt metaphor for what in our incoherence we call the mystery of life.

It wasn’t until I visited Oak Spring, however, that I actually got that, in its full implications.

… Enspirited … aslant … curtain of green (Les, Illinois)

For context, I’ve explored all kinds of gardens. In Bellagio and Como, Florence, and Rome during my travels in Italy. At the Huntington in San Marino. The Barnes Collection outside Philadelphia. I cut my teeth on cutwork parterres studying the gardens of Monticello and Morven and allowing that to inform my understanding of the gardens of my home: Charleston, South Carolina.

The Villa Serbelloni at Bellagio; one of seven themed gardens at the Huntington in San Marino, CA; and the Japanese garden at Morven in Albemarle County, Virginia.

But Oak Spring has got to be the closest thing to perfection I’ve ever experienced in a garden. Something about being there, living on site, walking the paths, moving in the rhythm of its days and its creator’s intentions, even for the short time I was there… I found it a space both intimate and grand, in which every element was in service to a harmonious overarching vision. (Below, I’m journaling and birding in the formal garden…)

And if the garden itself weren’t lovely enough, the fact that the vision is also memorialized in one of the most marvelous rare book libraries I’ve seen outside of a major research university is… just…

The library at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation is second to none. An amazing research resource only a short drive from Washington, D.C.

Words fail. It was perfection. As a gardening geek and a rare books geek, I still get shivers thinking about it.

At Oak Spring, I felt myself in the presence of a supreme gardening “intelligence”—not to mention a taste that became the beau ideal of an artlessly “informal formal” for an entire generation of tastemakers.

Bunny Mellon with her best bud, Jacqueline Kennedy, later Onassis. Jackie enjoyed hunting at the Mellons’ estate in Upperville and there’s a warm and affectionate correspondence between Jackie and both Bunny and Paul Mellon. Bunny designed the Rose Garden at the White House and was so trusted that she made all the memorial arrangements after JFK’s assassination. It’s got to say something about our times that Bunny’s garden was been ripped out and paved over during the 45 and 47 administrations.

I saw that intelligence married to unlimited wealth and access to the pinnacles of power. And I saw the sheer muscle of a work force numbering upwards of 450 that could be deployed to realize the vision. And all of this revealed the exact shape and dimensions of the type of privilege that had to be wielded to achieve Bunny Mellon’s enchanted paradise…

…Not the panacea the poet promised (Candace, Virginia)

And suddenly, weirdly, home—weeds and all— looked damn good in comparison.

Image from my garden in May.

After all, there are only two of us at Bellaflora, and we’re only in our third year of doing this. So it’s not surprising the operation looks ragtag at various points in the growing season. And it doesn’t change or diminish the fact that our story remains enchanted and the love is visible everywhere we’ve laid our hands.

I can’t actually express how much I’m enjoying the irony that it was spending an extended time amid the perfection that can only be achieved by great wealth that taught me to appreciate our guerrilla garden anew.

Most important, I think, was this moment of zen. It occurred to me that the degree to which we’re loving our gardens—as is, where they are, at whatever stage of development they are—is likely the degree to which we’re also loving ourselves, with all our weeds and imperfections.

It might seem a homespun truth, but I need to say this. Self-love—no matter the source—is how we’re going to survive the times we’re living through. There is no love of Other without love of Self and lord knows we need both. So let’s lock that knowledge in and hold it close to our hearts. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

1. Gretchen E. Henderson, environmental writer and gifted workshop leader.