Rachel Lambert Mellon

Rachel Lambert "Bunny" Mellon (August 9, 1910 – March 17, 2014) was an American horticulturalist, gardener, philanthropist, and art collector. She designed and planted a number of significant gardens, including the White House Rose Garden, and assembled one of the largest collections of rare horticultural books. Mellon was the second wife of philanthropist and horse breeder Paul Mellon. Rachel Lowe Lambert, nicknamed Bunny by her mother, was the eldest child of Gerard Barnes Lambert, president of the Gillette Safety Razor Company and a founder of Warner–Lambert, and his wife, Rachel Parkhill Lowe. Her paternal grandfather, chemist Jordan Lambert, was the inventor of Listerine, which was later marketed by her father. She had a brother and a sister: Gerard Barnes Lambert, Jr. (1912–1947; married Elsa Cover), who died in a 1947 plane crash, and Lily McCarthy (1914–2006; married twice, to William Wilson Fleming and John Gilman McCarthy, respectively). Lambert attended Miss Fine's School (Princeton, New Jersey) and the Foxcroft School (Middleburg, Virginia). Her parents divorced in 1933, and both subsequently remarried. On November 25, 1932, Lambert married Stacy Barcroft Lloyd Jr. of Ardmore, Pennsylvania, at Trinity Church, Princeton. He served in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. They divorced in 1948. They had two children: Stacy Barcroft Lloyd III, and Eliza Winn Lloyd. Eliza predeceased her mother. Lambert and her first husband became close friends of the banking heir and art collector Paul Mellon and his first wife, Mary Conover, who died of an asthma attack in 1946. After Lambert divorced Lloyd, she and Paul Mellon were married on May 1, 1948. By this marriage, she became the stepmother of Timothy Mellon and Catherine Conover Mellon (later Mrs. John Warner and now known as Catherine Conover). Together, the couple collected and donated more than a thousand works of art, mostly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European paintings, to the National Gallery of Art and established the Yale Center for British Art.