Exhibit offers rare glimpse at Bunny Mellon's botanical art

[...] Rachel "Bunny" Mellon's vast collection could be seen by invitation only at her Oak Spring Garden estate and library, just outside Washington, D.C.

In what is being billed as a coming-out party for the Mellon collection, more than 50 works, most never before shown in public, are now on view at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx.

"The collection certainly traces the history of gardening and horticulture... but also the evolution of our interaction with plants, from some of the earliest books on the cultivation on plants," said Sir Peter Crane, president of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation.

The New York show begins in the library's rotunda with reproductions of enormous, trompe l'oeil panels by French painter Fernand Renard, commissioned by Mellon for the walls of her greenhouse.

"In addition to being an avid collector of art, she trained her own topiaries," said Susan Fraser, vice-president and director of the botanical garden's library.