Rachel ‘Bunny’ Mellon, 1910–2014

last updated 8 January 2015

Raised in fabulous wealth and married to more of it, Rachel Mellon never had to work a day in her life. But as a child she found a passion for gardening that she would later exercise at some of the world’s finest homes, including the White House. “Like a magic carpet, it has carried me through life’s experiences, discoveries, joys, and sorrows,” she wrote.

A “paragon of understated luxury,” Rachel Lowe Lambert—nicknamed ‘Bunny’ by her mother—was born in Princeton, N.J., to a family that had made its fortune with Listerine, said The Wall Street Journal. After finishing school, her 1929 debut, and a first marriage that ended in divorce, she married Paul Mellon, the son of tycoon and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, and became a horticultural designer and society hostess at their 4,000-acre estate in Virginia. When her friend Jackie Kennedy moved into the White House, Mellon was commissioned to redesign the Rose Garden, which President Eisenhower had turned into a putting green. She and her husband were major patrons of the National Gallery of Art.

Mellon “preferred to live a courtly life that navigated away from the shoals of ostentation, family scandal, legal controversy,” and celebrity, said The Washington Post. But as she neared 100, she fell under the spell of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, providing him with $725,000 in what campaign aides called “Bunny money.” Without her knowledge, the funds went largely to supporting Edwards’s pregnant mistress, Rielle Hunter. “I suppose it’s my own damn fault,” she told the actor Frank Langella after Edwards’s disgrace. “He was so attractive. And you know I’m weak on good looks.”