Impressions Outdoors

Stroll the paths at the Frick this summer and enjoy our special seasonal plantings, chosen to bring the dazzling color and light of the Impressionist paintings to our landscape. In the Greenhouse and throughout the site, garden labels highlight connections with the paintings in the exhibition and Bunny Mellon’s accomplishments in the field of horticulture.

An Earnest Gardener

Bunny Mellon arranged her home interiors with paintings from some of the most revered French Impressionist artists in the canon of art history. The domestic spaces she designed reflect the interiors seen in some of these paintings, brimming with thoughtfully curated details. Mellon’s influence on American interior design culture is ubiquitous. Her greatest accomplishments, though, were in the field of horticulture. A self-taught horticulturalist, her lifelong obsession with gardening began in childhood when she started transplanting wildflowers at age six. She is said to have started designing garden plots by the time she was 12. As her interest grew, she studied rare horticulture books to learn the secrets of pioneers in the field who had designed and planted the elaborate, historic gardens of Europe. Most often cited is Mellon’s Kennedy-era redesign of the White House Rose Garden. And most significant is the creation of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation and Library, a Virginia-based institution dedicated to the history and future of horticulture. Our display recalls Bunny Mellon’s penchant for weaving ancient European gardening practices into her landscape designs.


Topiary on display in the Greenhouse pays homage to Bunny Mellon’s trendsetting popularization of topiary in interior and landscape design. 


New rose beds flank the main gate near the Grable Visitor Center, in homage to Bunny Mellon’s single most cited horticultural accomplishment—the 1961 redesign of the White House Rose Garden. 

Impressions Outdoors

Flowers are the objects in nature that display the palettes of pastel hues and saturated colors that characterize impressionist painting. Foliage can be gracefully communicated with a few, broad brushstrokes. The landscape design throughout the Frick grounds takes cues from the paintings in the exhibition at The Frick Art Museum. The Greenhouse features an assortment of flowers including zinnias, dahlias, fuchsia, verbena, lobelia, alyssum, and gloxinia. These flowers were favorites during the late 1800s, and also are featured in paintings by Monet, Fantin-Latour and Sisley.