Rachel Lambert Mellon, an heir to the Listerine fortune and a horticulturalist, fine arts collector and philanthropist who redesigned the White House Rose Garden, died on Monday at the Upperville, Va., estate that had been her principal residence for decades. She was 103.
Her death was confirmed by her friend and longtime lawyer, Alexander D. Forger.
Born into wealth and married to men with banking, oil and steel empires, Mrs. Mellon had houses in New York and Washington, apartments in Paris and country seats on Cape Cod, Antigua and Nantucket, besides her estate in Virginia. Her friends were presidents, royalty, socialites and celebrities. Late in her life, her support for the presidential aspirations of Senator John Edwards of North Carolina made news when scandal engulfed him.
Mrs. Mellon was the eldest child of Gerard Barnes Lambert, president of the Gillette Safety Razor Company, whose father founded Lambert pharmaceuticals and invented Listerine. Her first husband, Stacy Barcroft Lloyd Jr., was a Pennsylvania businessman and horse breeder, and her second was Paul Mellon, the only son of Andrew W. Mellon, one of the world's richest financiers and treasury secretary to three presidents.
Fresh-faced, slender, ebullient, radiating confidence, she was a dazzling figure in a swirling cotillion or at the taffrail of a steamer. But beyond her carefree life of parties and travels, her real love was gardening - and she was good at it. She had been fascinated with gardens since childhood, watching the landscape man at her home in Princeton, studying prints of flora and pictures of gardens.
Though not formally trained, she had an instinct for horticulture. She read her way through the subject and learned about gardens firsthand in America, England, France and Italy. As a girl, she built miniature gardens in wooden boxes, incorporating stone steps, soil and topiary. Her first professional job, at 23, was a garden for the designer Hattie Carnegie, who paid her with a coat and dress.
She designed gardens for dozens of clients, many of them her friends, and donated the payments to horticultural or medical causes. She shaped terrains, used trees as sculpture and horizons as frames, selected indigenous plants so they would flourish, formed interplays of shadow and light, and created subtle palettes of colors in the impressionist tradition of the landscape architect Beatrix Jones Farrand.
And she knew the Latin names: Ixia viridiflora, Platyclinis filiformis and Cymbidium Miretta. In an interview with Vogue, she complained that varieties of Alchemilla, a herbaceous perennial commonly known as lady's mantle, were 'well known in England and, I think, not enough appreciated in America.'
Like many other fabulously wealthy people, she lived largely out of the public eye, shielded by lawyers and public relations retainers, unlisted addresses and phone numbers, and retinues to shop and buy tickets. But she became known to many Americans in 1961, after President John F. Kennedy's inauguration, when at the request of her friend Jacqueline Kennedy she redesigned the White House Rose Garden.
Long used for presidential announcements and ceremonies, the Rose Garden, a plot 125 feet long and 60 feet wide outside the Oval Office in the West Wing, was created by Ellen Wilson, President Woodrow Wilson's wife, in 1913, replacing a colonial garden planted in 1902 by Edith Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt's wife. President Dwight D. Eisenhower cut down the roses and turned it into a putting green.
Mrs. Mellon crafted a central lawn bordered by flower beds in the French style, but with American botanical specimens: 'Katherine' crab apples, little leaf lindens, diamond-shape hedges of thyme, and on the corners Magnolia soulangeana specimens she found floating in the Tidal Basin of Washington. Roses were the primary flowering plant, but seasonal flowers were interspersed to add year-round color.
Her next work, the White House East Garden, was incomplete when Mr. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. But President Lyndon B. Johnson's wife, Lady Bird, another friend, asked her to finish it, and it was dedicated in 1965 as the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden.
For her work, Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall gave Mrs. Mellon the Conservation Service Award in 1966. 'The nation will be ever indebted to you for your gift of talent to the design and development of the Rose Garden and the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden at the White House,' he said.
Decades later, Mrs. Mellon helped finance Mr. Edwards's presidential efforts for several years before his campaign collapsed in 2008, when he acknowledged having an affair with Rielle Hunter, a videographer, with whom he secretly had a child.
A 2010 tell-all book by a former Edwards aide, Andrew Young, said some of Mrs. Mellon's later contributions had been used to support Ms. Hunter. Mrs. Mellon's lawyer, Mr. Forger, said she had not known about Ms. Hunter.
Rachel Lowe Lambert was born in Princeton on Aug. 9, 1910, one of three children of Gerard Barnes Lambert and the former Rachel Lowe. Her father became president of the family pharmaceutical firm, which was later Warner-Lambert and eventually Pfizer. She attended Miss Fine's School in Princeton and Foxcroft, a girls' preparatory school in Middleburg, Va.
In 1932 she married Mr. Lloyd. The couple had two children and were divorced in 1948. Mr. Lloyd died in 1994. She married Mr. Mellon, the art patron and philanthropist who was heir to a colossal fortune, in 1948. He died in 1999.
Mrs. Mellon is survived by her son, Stacy Barcroft Lloyd 3rd; by two children of her second husband's by a previous marriage, Timothy Mellon and Catherine Conover Mellon; and by two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Mrs. Mellon's daughter, Eliza Winn Lloyd Moore, died in 2008.
The Mellons had many homes but spent much of their time at Oak Spring, the Virginia estate near Upperville where they entertained celebrities, including the Kennedys and Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth. The couple bred and raced horses, donated works to the National Gallery of Art, and gave millions to charities.
She also turned the estate into a botanist's paradise: her garden, greenhouses and library, an extensive collection of rare botanical and horticultural books, manuscripts, prints and illustrations. Among the volumes was her own: 'An Oak Spring Flora,' (1997), written with Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi.
Her garden sites included Mrs. Kennedy's summer home on Martha's Vineyard, Hubert de Givenchy's Manoir du Jonchet in France, and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum overlooking Boston Harbor, where among her plantings is dune grass that bends in the wind, reminiscent of the Cape Cod terrain where the president loved to walk.
'Mrs. Mellon has the combination of sensitivity and imagery with technical knowledge that you only find among the best professionals,' said I. M. Pei, her collaborator.
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