Melania Trump unveiled on Saturday her redevelopment of the Rose Garden in the White House, a month-long project that included digging trees, replacing vibrant floral beds with white and pastel roses and laying paved walkways.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but the decisions still caused confusion online about how the “after” photos showed an improvement from the “before”.
Trump’s overhaul was designed in part to ‘pursue the dynamic needs of the modern presidency’, including making the space more accessible to TV cameras and other technical needs of the press corps. Donald Trump has in recent weeks begun holding press conferences in the garden as well as in the briefing room because of Covid-19. It is expected to backfire on Melania Trump’s Republican National Convention address on Tuesday, a controversial location choice that Democrats say is an illegal use of White House grounds.
President John F. Kennedy, who commissioned the garden in 1961, approached the project with a somewhat similar mindset, asking gardener and gardener Rachel Lambert Mellon to design “useful and attractive” because he intended to that it would be used daily in the neighborhood.
Mellon wrote a first-person account for The White House Historical Association about the design and construction of the garden. Kennedy and the First Lady had just returned from a trip abroad in the summer of 1961 to Europe and Australia, where the President “recognized the importance of gardens for an official stay and their appeal to the sensitivity of all.” people, “she wrote.
Crab apple trees were central to the design. Melania tore them out.
Mellon decided trees would be an important component to include in their design, for both aesthetic and practical reasons. (Washington swells in the summer.)
One tree, a member of the rose family, anchored the long perimeter lines of the garden:
The trees we chose were Katherine crab apples. Crab apples belong to the rose family and would mix well with the roses, perennials, annuals, and herbs that grow under and around them. Aware that the garden would be used almost every day of the year and that the president had high hopes for it, I decided to divide the long beds into sections. The design, with a crab apple as the center of each section, would repeat itself and run like a ribbon the length of both beds.
A large diamond-shaped radiance of santolina would surround any crab-apple tree. Each diamond would set in a larger contour: a small incised English boxwood hedge and, next to the lawn, a low-growing hybrid boxwood called Greenpillow, developed by Henry Hohman in Kingsville, Maryland.
Melania Trump dug them up. ABC reports that the dozens of trees will be replanted elsewhere on the grounds of the White House.
However, they introduced a three-foot-wide limestone path around the perimeter of the center lawn. (The White House said less noticeable changes include improvements to make the garden more accessible to people with disabilities.)
Melania also exchanged the colorful tulips and other bright perennials and annuals in Mellon’s design for white and pastel roses and sharp buckwheat hedges. Mellon said Kennedy had asked for the live broadcast. “The president loves flowers and asked if a variety of other species could be mixed with the roses. He had read Thomas Jefferson’s published garden notes and hoped to use flowers during Jefferson’s period, ‘she wrote.
There are more important things than gardening
The changes to the Rose Garden hit a nerve on Saturday, with two-way tweets dominating Twitter. Why, how many critics asked, did Melania have to change the design anyway? And why unpack trees? Why do the flowers become less lively?
Still, many recognized that there are more things to be crazy about in Washington today than landscapes. There’s the White House’s failed response to the pandemic that killed 200,000 Americans, according to the New York Times. There’s the fact that Republicans in the Senate have no plans to pass a bill to help millions of workers left unemployed without Covid-19.
Maybe, though, in the midst of a dark moment, one where we’re all looking for some good news and a glimmer of hope that our leaders can just help us get through it, to see the White House a patch of brightness feels bigger than it would otherwise.
