Mac Griswold is an acclaimed cultural landscape historian and writer. Rooted in a childhood spent exploring the castles and towers of lush north central New Jersey, Mac went on to study landscape design at the Radcliffe Seminars and horticulture at the New York Botanical Gardens.
After living and writing in New York City for decades and on the East End of Long Island for twenty years, Mac decamped for Virginia in 2014 where she lived for seven years not far from Bunny Mellon’s library, archives, and gardens in Upperville before moving to rural Pennsylvania, her present home, where she continues to write and to garden.
Her previous books have centered on lives and places of cultural and historic importance. This book, I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise, a Life of Bunny Mellon, her first full biography, is no exception.
Books in order of publication:
Pleasures of the Garden: Images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art – 1987
The Golden Age of American Gardens: Proud Owners * Private Estates 1890-1940 – 1991
Washington’s Gardens at Mount Vernon: Landscape of the Inner Man – 1999
The Manor – 2013
I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise – 2022
Oak Lawn Library Friends 