RACHEL LAMBERT MELLON‘s Manhattan living room is one made from dreams — palest pink walls and chintz, gilded picture frames and pools of light, romance and cosiness and a roaring fire . . . Naturally, the rest of the apartment is equally lovely, with paintings by Édouard Manet hung on crosshatched lapis lazuli walls, and even a latticed garden vestibule, along with a vast collection of the finest English equestrian and French Impressionist paintings and splendid modern art, including Mark Rothko canvases . . .

The Oak Spring Garden Library was designed by modernist architect, Edward Larrabee Barnes, in 1980 to hold Bunny’s more than 13,000 landscape-design books.

Mellon, known to the world as Bunny, an American self-taught yet award-winning landscape designer & horticulture scholar, passed away March on 17, 2014 at the age of 103. Credited with the White House’s Rose Garden and the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, Mellon and her husband also helped with the revival of Louis XIV’s kitchen garden at Versailles.

Here, we catch a rare glimpse of photos by British photographer, Michael Dunne, taken for the Mellons’ archives, of their homes in Manhattan; Oak Spring, the Mellons’ 4,000-acre farm in Upperville, Virginia; Oyster Harbors, in Osterville, Massachusetts; and Antigua.