How Bunny Mellon’s whimsical world inspired Tiffany’s latest collection

Under a mysterious tunnel woven from branches and flanked by flowerbeds, an endless table stretched out, covered in extraordinary floral arrangements. Each gilded chair — set with fine china and silver cutlery — awaited a celebrity, from actress Greta Lee (who wore around her neck a chrysoprase necklace centered on two diamond birds perched atop an exceptional 22‑carat Brazilian aquamarine) to actor Connor Storrie (whose lapel held a brooch featuring a 66‑carat spessartine surrounded by sapphires, blue spinels, fire opals, and diamonds).

That tunnel was just one of the nods to the creative universe of Bunny Mellon, one of Truman Capote’s swans, an indispensable socialite among the ladies who lunch, and a collector of the most memorable pieces by Jean Schlumberger — the creative soul of Tiffany & Co from the 1950s until his death in the 1980s (and whose legacy remains a constant presence).

Mellon — and the jewels she created in collaboration with him — is the focus of the 2026 Blue Book, the high‑jewelry catalogue Tiffany & Co has produced since 1845. This year, the edition is a tribute titled Hidden Garden.

“This year’s collection stands out for the large number of exceptional gems it contains,” explains Victoria Reynolds, the house’s principal gemologist, who collaborated with creative director Nathalie Verdeille. “While we are showing extraordinary diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires, we are also pushing beyond traditional selections by adding very unexpected gem types and unusual combinations that achieve particularly striking silhouettes.”

The collection’s unveiling took place at the Armory, the imposing neo‑Renaissance building on New York’s Park Avenue that once housed the city’s Seventh Regiment before the War of Independence and still preserves interiors shaped in part by Louis Comfort Tiffany, the son of the founder of the empire that continues to produce some of the world’s most coveted jewels.

During her lifetime, Rachel Bunny Mellon acquired more than 140 pieces created by Schlumberger, with whom she developed a deep creative affinity. He loved to play with natural diamonds, colored gemstones, and enamel to craft jewels inspired by flora and fauna, full of movement.

She possessed an immense fortune (she was the heiress to Listerine and Colgate and later married the billionaire Paul Mellon), but also a singular sensitivity for the decorative arts, bucolic interior design, and above all, gardening. She designed the White House Rose Garden when Jackie Kennedy lived there, and the pinnacle of her aesthetic vision still lives on at her Oak Springs estate in Virginia.

There, she practiced a French gardening technique known as espalier, training the branches of fruit trees into unexpected shapes. The original orange‑branch tunnel she created on that property is the one replicated at the Armory, along with other corners that inspired, for example, the Bird on a Rock, the original brooch on which the legendary 128.54‑carat Tiffany Diamond was once mounted.

For the occasion, the house also transformed the top floors of The Landmark — its Fifth Avenue headquarters — into replicas of the estate’s most distinctive rooms. In the re‑creation of her greenhouse, whose walls were lined with copies of the pastoral frescoes that adorn the original, visitors found Schlumberger’s sketches and letters to Mellon, as well as the pieces that form the foundation of the Hidden Garden collection.

From these emerged the Jasmine necklaces (one with sculptural platinum silhouettes framing exquisite diamonds, another in yellow and white gold alive with kunzites); the Twin Bud chokers, which reinterpret sculptural platinum vines paired with diamonds and Zambian emeralds that bloom like flower buds; and the Butterfly pieces, crafted with white diamonds, Fancy Vivid Yellow diamonds, and padparadscha sapphires that evoke the movement, light, and color of butterflies.

“Those may be my favorite gems in this collection because they are extremely rare stones with a magical pink tone so characteristic that it reveals subtle nuances as the light changes, from a soft coral to a radiant peach,” Reynolds explains.

Under a garden pergola, nestled within a spectacular floral installation, the birds of paradise from the extraordinary Hidden Garden brooch collection were “perched.” Also inspired by Schlumberger’s imaginative designs, each bird has its own personality, heightened by the extraordinary gemstones at the heart of each piece — including the one worn by Storrie.

In another room, a re‑creation of Bunny Mellon’s basket storage space in her New York home, visitors could explore the horology collection, which included the most fantastical wristwatches (Tiffany’s specialty is gem‑laden women’s timepieces) and, above all, the crown jewel: a table clock called Singing Bird on a Clock. Limited to 25 pieces, it is the result of years of development in collaboration with the Swiss manufacture Reuge, combining timekeeping with a mechanical songbird that chirps, opens and closes its beak, and unfurls its wings. That melodious trill could not be missing from such an exclusive garden.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition