Hi there!

I will have a rare opportunity to visit the personal library of Bunny Mellon which hosts a collection of over 19,000 objects, including rare books, manuscripts, and works of art dating back to the 14th century. It mainly encompasses works relating to horticulture, landscape design, botany, natural history and voyages of exploration.

I want to make the most of this visit because it might not happen again. If I have a chance, what books or artwork should I ask to view? There is a library catalog where I can search if it's there.

Thank you!

You didn't advise us of where your interest lies. Design? Plants? Fruit trees?

How exciting! I would look for books by Gertrude Jekyll.

Oh! Thank you for asking. Well, I have interest in anything and everything plant related. It seems I learn something new every day that I never heard about before, so nothing is off limits. I have an interest in ancient gardening, gardening through history, medicinal gardening, botany, kitchen gardening, historic botanical drawings, works of horticultural literature that I can't afford and can't find in my public library.

That is an awfully large bite to bite into, chuckl, One visit, - there is an author on Porkpals post, Northern Va, hmmm, hills or coastal? Me, I lean toward kitchen more than medicinal, since the medicinals are strong on purges, shake head, good diet doesn't need those. Feed a fever, starve a cold, no diuretics please. I do love visiting the fruit trees and espalier techniques, layout designs... have fun most of all.

Some of Jekyll's works have fold-out planting charts that are fragile, and so few survive. They are worth admiring. She had an amazing genius with perennial borders.
Some of the things I seek out in rare book libraries (like the Huntington) include:
early herbals
Darwin
early plant explorers
Victorian illustrations
Curtis' Botanical magazine
Leonardo da Vinci sketches
If photography is allowed you may want to take a rig for shooting books.

Some of Gertrude Jekyll's books can be found free and online in digital form, because they are among books written before their copyright expired in 1923 (for USA - criteria vary among different nations)

One good source is the Gutenberg Project: https://www.gutenberg.org/eboo...

Hope this adds a useful dimension to your visit - not to mention beyond - and I'll return with more links and titles to help in your search.

This thread got me looking up Gertrude Jekyll and finding a ton of images online for her garden layouts. They're quite beautiful and a good variety repeated within each layout, lots of wonderful ideas.

I've wondered about how it's possible that two people can look at the same garden and one complain that 'there's nothing there' or 'what a mess' while the other extols its transporting beauty? I think the difference might be how we all differ from our points of perspectives on: design. Gertrude Jekyll was a designer, if nothing else, while Henry Mitchell might have been more of a commentator on the human condition, from the platform of a garden (in between the lines). I say this for the sake of argument, because those two (and the rest of us) often overlap with respect to the opinions that divide us. Another garden notable for timeless beauty - but perhaps not at first glance for design - is Celia Thaxter's garden - but to digress - would we really prefer a Japanese garden of sand and two rocks or Thaxter's summer hullabaloo of hollyhocks at the gate while hoards of poppies marched beyond the gate down to the sea, as portrayed in Childe Hassam's paintings of her garden?

I hope I'll be forgiven for the foregoing opinions, because they're only meant to be rhetorical devices for admiring the gardens of Gertrude Jekyll and Celia Thaxter in the light of each other.

Sooo - I can't recommend Celia Thaxter's "An Island Garden" highly enough: https://digital.library.upenn.... - illustrated by the American impressionist, Childe Hassam.

And Henry Mitchell - https://www.nytimes.com/1994/0...

karen
Oella

ps - Celia Thaxter's "Plan of Garden with List of Flowers" can be found right after the index near the beginning of her book - fun to compare with a Jekyll garden design - as I once heard a landscape designer lecturing at the Smithsonian say (words to the effect) - [our gardens all have an axis dividing it down the middle like that of Versailles (designed more for access through garden by horse and buggy than for moseying around by foot - hence begonias as far as the eye could see)] - https://en.chateauversailles.f...