In the serene, green-dappled world of Upperville, Virginia, there exists a library that is less a collection of books and more a sanctuary of obsession. This is the Oak Spring Garden Library, the intellectual epicentre of the late Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon, a woman who possessed the rare ability to make a thousand-acre estate feel as intimate as a potting shed. Mrs. Mellon was a horticulturalist of the highest order, a woman who redesigned the White House Rose Garden and yet famously preferred the “informal” look of a garden table left out under a passing cloud.
It is this specific, curated nonchalance that de Gournay, the purveyors of hand-painted wallpaper, have sought to capture in their latest porcelain endeavour. The new series, titled Le Jardin Curieux, is the newest collection in their ongoing collaboration with the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. It is, in the most literal sense, an archive brought to lunch.
“Her passionate and unwavering patronage of the arts and the handmade resonates deeply with our own dedication,” said Hannah Cecil Gurney, de Gournay’s Director. “As a true legend of American design, it is a remarkable opportunity for us to be immersed within Mrs. Mellon’s incredible world.”
The collection takes its name from a 17th-century manuscript by Julius François de Geest, an illuminated volume titled Jardin des Rares et Curieux Fleurs, which sits among the thousands of rarities in Mrs. Mellon’s library. But rather than producing a stiff, museum-grade replica, de Gournay’s artisans have channeled Bunny’s signature restraint. Along the porcelain rims, large-scale passion flowers and sweet peas unfurl in airy, hand-painted arrangements. They are contained, if one can ever truly contain a sweet pea, by a delicate double band of soft brown, a subtle nod to Mrs. Mellon’s lifelong preference for the earthy and the unpretentious.
The design evokes the serenity of a garden table beneath the open sky, echoing Mrs. Mellon’s belief that true elegance should never look like it’s trying too hard. Le Jardin Curieux joins a broader series that draws upon the botanical works of Charles Germain de Saint-Aubin and Abraham Munting, men whose drawings once fueled Mrs. Mellon’s own horticultural studies.
In an era of mass-produced minimalism, there is something stubbornly lovely about a plate that requires a master artisan’s brushstroke. Each piece is a testament to a woman who spent her life in a dialogue with nature, and who understood that a garden, much like a well-set table, is a place where art and dirt comfortably coexist. It is a collection for those who know that the most curious things in the garden are often the ones we choose to bring inside.
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