Summer’s Biggest Jewellery Trend Is Growing In Your Back Garden

When socialite, billionairess and horticulturalist Bunny Mellon was a girl, she would return from her travels with pockets full of seeds, heading straight from the aeroplane to her New Jersey greenhouse, where she cultivated black parrot carnations, pheasant-eye narcissus and hummingbird tulips.

Mellon’s lifelong devotion to gardening – the Listerine heiress redesigned the White House Rose Garden for John F Kennedy in 1961 – inspired Tiffany & Co’s latest Blue Book: Hidden Garden high jewellery collection. A suite of exquisite one-off creations, the offering pays tribute to her enduring friendship with the house’s visionary designer Jean Schlumberger, who created many jewels for Mellon throughout her lifetime, taking inspiration from the imperfect asymmetry and vibrant colours of the natural world. “The flowers, the bees and new greens everywhere,” Mellon wrote in a note in the 1950s, “turn one into a useless dreamer.”
Mellon’s confession could just as easily summarise the spring/summer 2026 collections as a whole – a literal growing season, with jewellers and fashion designers planting the seeds for a bumper crop of flora- and fauna-inspired creations. Think Loewe’s woven watering-can handbags; Hermès bucket bags, upon which three-dimensional birds alighted; and top-handle styles from Dior and Prada bursting into bloom. Then there were the magic toadstools and pink weeping willows that unfurled across the set of Matthieu Blazy’s haute couture debut, complete with pumps perched on mushroom-shaped heels and parrot-head buttons scattered throughout the collection. “I was interested in birds, birds in general, because they are free, because they travel, because they come from every place,” Blazy told Vogue’s Nicole Phelps at the time. “I thought it was a beautiful metaphor for women today.”