Mac Griswold' s The Manor is the biography of a uniquely American place that has endured through wars great and small, through fortunes won and lost, through histories bright and sinister-- and of the family that has lived there since its founding as a New England slave plantation three and a half centuries ago. In 1984, the landscape historian Mac Griswold was rowing along a Long Island creek when she came upon a stately yellow house and a garden guarded by looming boxwoods. She instantly...

Bunny Mellon, whose life was marked by astonishing good fortune as well as tragedy and scandal, remains a singular figure in the annals of American design. She had her finger on the pulse of American culture and possessed a rare sense of style and grace. Her most celebrated work—the White House Rose Garden—demonstrated how formal restraint and the sparing use of color could be deployed to maximal effect.In I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise, Mac Griswold—who knew Mellon per...