Rachel Lambert Mellon-the American gardening and design idol who died in March at age 103 and was univer-sally known as Bunny-believed that style was order and that order brought pleasure. In the 1950s, when I first visited Oak Spring, the Mellons' 4,000-acre stud farm in Upperville, Virginia, during a boarding-school weekend with her daughter, Eliza Lloyd, I opened one of my classmate's bedroom cupboards to find shelf after shelf of rigorously color-coded stacks of T-shirts. Outside, the mature trees lining the property's roads and dotting its pastures were the best editions of themselves: perfect lindens, oaks, maples, and hickories, their tidy profiles controlled by intense pruning. Architect John Barnes-whose father, Edward Larrabee Barnes, designed the estate's renowned library, a skylit barnlike structure of white-painted local stone holding more than 13,000 garden-related books, many of them rare-remembers Mellon chatting by "walkie-talkie with an arborist sitting in a tree a mile and a half away. He was shaping it to create her ideal viewshed. Whatever was in sight was part of the garden."
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