A biography of Bunny Mellon, the style icon and American aristocrat who designed the White House Rose Garden for her friend JFK and served as a living witness to 20th Century American history, operating in the high-level arenas of politics, diplomacy, art and fashion. Bunny Mellon, who died in 2014 at age 103, was press-shy during her lifetime. With the co-operation of Bunny Mellon's family, author Meryl Gordon received access to thousands of pages of her letters, diaries and appointment calendars and has interviewed more than 175 people to capture the spirit of this talented American original.

This chronological account takes you through the key events in the lives of Virginia and Leonard Woolf through a history of their home, Monk’s House in Sussex, where Virginia wrote most of her major novels. The story of this magical garden includes selected quotations from the writings of the Woolfs which reveal how important a role the garden played in their lives, as a source of both pleasure and inspiration. Bought by them in 1919 as a country retreat, Monk's House was somewhere they came to read, write and work in the garden. Virginia wrote first in a converted tool shed, and later in her purpose-built wooden writing lodge tucked into a corner of the orchard. Enriched with rare archive images and embroidered garden plans, the book takes the reader on a journey through the various garden ‘rooms’, (including the Italian Garden, the Fishpond Garden, the Millstone Terrace and the Walled Garden), each presented in the context of the lives of the Woolfs, with fascinating glimpses into their daily routines at Rodmell.

For more than seventy-five years, The Garden Club of Virginia has undertaken garden research and preservation work at numerous historic sites across the Old Dominion, restoring and creating beautiful landscapes for the education and enjoyment of all, from backyard gardeners to design professionals. Historic Virginia Gardens documents in breathtaking fashion this important contribution to the Commonwealth's botanical and architectural heritage. Picking up where an earlier volume, dedicated to the period from 1930 to 1975, left off, this new book brings the Club's work from the period 1975 to 2007 to life through a graceful and informative text by Margaret Page Bemiss, a host of historical and contemporary drawings, extensive native and heritage plant lists, and 125 splendid new color photographs from the award-winning garden photographer Roger Foley. The gardens highlighted here range in location from the Eastern Shore to Blacksburg, and date from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first. Margaret Bemiss describes not only the preservation of the gardens, but also each place, its builder, and its historic context. Giving the reader a fuller understanding of why each particular garden or landscape was worth restoring or re-creating, Bemiss explains the site's significance, in Virginia's rich history as well as in the history of gardening and landscape design. In addition to Foley's photographs, each narrative is also accompanied by bird's-eye-view drawings and site plans for the gardens, along with working drawings of garden buildings, furniture, fences, and gates. Of particular interest to practicing gardeners and garden historians is the comprehensive list of native and imported plants that were utilized in the gardens. The significance of the projects, from George Washington's Mount Vernon and Gari Melcher's Belmont to the Prestons' frontier home in Blacksburg and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, make this book of interest not only to gardeners and landscape architects, but also to anyone with an interest in American history. Historic Virginia Gardens is sure to find a treasured place on the library shelf beside its predecessor, which was praised by the Virginian-Pilot as a "book [that] will please any gardener, be it a group restoring grounds around a shrine or a suburbanite pondering whether to plant phlox or periwinkle along the front walk."

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection “[Lucey] delivers the goods, disclosing the unhappy or colorful lives that Sargent sometimes hinted at but didn’t spell out.”—Boston Globe In this seductive, multilayered biography, based on original letters and diaries, Donna M. Lucey illuminates four extraordinary women painted by the iconic high-society portraitist John Singer Sargent. With uncanny intuition, Sargent hinted at the mysteries and passions that unfolded in his subjects’ lives. These women inhabited a rarefied world of wealth and strict conventions—yet all of them did something unexpected, something shocking, to upend society’s rules.

Historic Alexandria Foundation. This record of a famous port's architectural life includes 375 photographs of more than 500 buildings dating from 1749 to the mid-19th century.