Who knew that 10 crab apple trees gone AWOL could spark nationwide outrage? But such was the case on Saturday, when first lady Melania Trump’s under-wraps renovation of the White House’s world-famous Rose Garden—created for President John F. Kennedy in 1962 by the philanthropist and garden designer Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon—was unveiled to the press, and the ethereal, pink-flowering ornamentals were nowhere to be seen. The boxwood-delineated north and south parterres of the West Wing area had also been revised: Sweeps of largely white roses trucked in, and expanses of limestone, looking raw in the bright August sunshine, framed the central lawn.
The work was carried out by Oehme, van Sweden and Associates and Perry Guillot Inc., two award-winning American firms, under the direction of the 14-member Committee for the Preservation of the White House and the three-member Committee for the Preservation of the White House Grounds, plus 10 external advisers. That’s a lot of expert cooks in the kitchen, among them the grounds committee’s Leslie Greene Bowman, the president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation; Richard C. Nylander, the curator emeritus of Historic New England; and Thammanoune Kannalikham, the low-profile White House interior designer.
Since the Rose Garden was revealed, social media has crackled with fury, condemnation, personal attacks, and, as always, misinformation. (More on that, anon.) “This is just a sad quadrangle,” former NPR executive producer Kitty Eisele said in a dispirited Tweet. NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell retweeted a photograph of the garden posted by the presidential historian Michael Beschloss and the plaint “What happened to the trees?” Then there was Mark Magowan, a cofounder of Vendome Press, publisher of exquisite books about interiors, gardens, and architecture, including Linda Jane Holden’s The Gardens of Bunny Mellon (2018). He emailed me on Monday morning to say, “I find it shocking that a committee, operating in complete secrecy, has the authority to neuter one of the most beloved public spaces in the White House complex.”
That’s an argument with which I happen to agree, though the transparency might have proven unwieldy and resulted in even more blowback. The Rose Garden team nevertheless should have anticipated the firestorm by posting the plans and their developments on the White House website, welcoming comments (good or ill), and talking about it in interviews instead of announcing the renovation just weeks before it was to start. Still, if Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram bear accurate witness, it must be said that many of President Donald J. Trump’s supporters have praised the refreshed Rose Garden, calling it elegant, appropriate, and, as one tweeted, “clean and classy.” Guillot, a Hamptons-based talent whose clients include Aerin Lauder and Tory Burch, told me via email, “The project has been the honor of my career.”
The Rose Garden revision strikes me as the epitome of deluxe-hotel graciousness. Treeless beds flank the central lawn like the borders of a carpet rather than reaching for the sky like a cathedral; the 10th of an acre seems deflated, even though the attendant roses haven’t yet grown in and indeed might never do so. (Keep reading; you’ll find out why.) In addition to lending height, the crab apples, which are members of the rose family, also helped mask the West Colonnade’s stark white columns, white walls, and odd floating fanlights. Architecture buffs such as Eric Groft of Oehme, van Sweden are delighted to see the colonnade, designed by Benjamin Latrobe and Thomas Jefferson, so fully visible now, but the crab apples’ disappearing act remains perplexing. Especially so given that Oehme, van Sweden’s White House Rose Garden Landscape Report offered two attractive alternatives—both of which incorporated crab apples rising from the parterres as intended by Mellon, an exceptionally gifted amateur, and landscape architect Perry Wheeler, with whom she worked on the project.
“When Bunny Mellon went to the White House and began planning the garden, what glared at her was the whiteness of the mansion, the West Wing, and the colonnade. She found it to be garish,” Linda Jane Holden, a Mellon expert, garden historian, and former member of Nancy Reagan’s East Wing staff, told me. “She wanted to soften it, so the garden would enhance the architecture and vice versa. Now, it doesn’t enhance the architecture; it aggravates it. It’s not an inviting environment.” The absent crab apples, Holden added, left her “aghast.”
Some clarifications are necessary, so hold on to your secateurs: The Rose Garden as the world has long known it is a bit of a creative sham, sort of like the White House itself, of which little historic interior fabric remained after President Harry S. Truman gutted the place. Hand-wringers might be interested to know that Mellon’s original crab apples, a 1928 pale-pink variety called Katherine, disappeared for good in 2003, when, having grown too large, they were replaced with younger examples. Those were replaced in 2010 and again in 2019, when Katherine was superseded by Spring Snow, a Canadian white-flowering variety that dates to 1963. The latter trees, which didn’t thrive, are reportedly being relocated elsewhere on the White House property.
Other Rose Garden inhabitants have come and gone over the years too, including the boxwood hedges, which have been replaced as many as four times, most recently a few weeks ago. Ironically, “roses have a tough time surviving in that garden,” Holden explains, citing the heat and humidity of Washington, D.C., as well as the site’s lack of air circulation, thanks to the West Wing’s embrace. Irvin M. Williams, who worked as the White House head gardener from 1962 until his retirement in 2008, once told her that such challenges had turned the site into a show garden by the 1980s. Some roses were planted in the ground, while others were set on the ground in pots that were concealed beneath surrounding foliage and then transported to a greenhouse at the National Park Service’s Kenilworth Park & Aquarium after the flowering was finished. “Plants were constantly being shipped back and forth,” Holden says.
Now seems the time to address the unfounded accusation declaring that Mrs. Trump and her committees heartlessly tossed out roses dating back to 1913, when Edith Carow Roosevelt’s fussy 1902 Colonial Garden became Ellen Axson Wilson’s classical rose garden, which was the first iteration actually dedicated to those flowers. By the time Kennedy was elected, only a few Tom Thumb shrub roses, a 1930s variety, remained. Mellon’s 1962 garden included some roses but many more perennials and herbs. (President Kennedy wanted plants that grew at Monticello.) The only Kennedy-era vegetation that has survived over the years are the saucer magnolias that mark the rectangular garden’s corners and an osmanthus hedge that runs along the West Colonnade.
That being said, every administration since then has maintained Mellon’s angular boxwood framework. “My office was a very strong proponent of the historic planted Mellon parterre design,” Guillot, who also worked on the landscape around the White House’s new tennis pavilion, told me. “I held firm that their precise footprints be installed, and my earliest design plans show them. They are planted now in the very same design and location as [in] 1962.” The Rose Garden’s plants, though, have always been subject to the whims of the first families and the National Park Service, which has jurisdiction over the garden and hasn’t maintained it as well as it should have. Often this is to the garden’s detriment, like the root-disturbing, decades-long revolving door of brightly flowered seasonal crowd pleasers, from spring tulips to fall chrysanthemums.
Per Eric Groft of Oehme, van Sweden, Mrs. Trump prefers pastel flowers, hence the current abundance of John F. Kennedy and Pope John Paul II white roses, relieved here and there by Peace roses in pink and cream. (Seasonal bulbs and annuals will populate the zigzag borders that front the parterres’ triangular compartments.) Gardeners across America were startled by the roses seen blooming at Saturday’s opening, because the aforementioned varieties do poorly in Washington’s hellish summer heat and humidity. Never fear: They are merely pretty placeholders and likely won’t be around long. As Groft explains, the garden team’s decision-making took longer than expected, meaning that climate-appropriate roses of sufficient size could not be found in time for the early August groundbreaking. Guillot saved the day by gathering large blooming bushes from a Long Island nursery and which would look suitably lush during Saturday’s unveiling if handled with care.
“To get the right size bushes, you have to order them in January or February instead of May,” Groft tells me. Later White House occupants will be pleased to see that the extensive Rose Garden report, the first of its kind, features photographs of varieties that relish Washington’s weather and which come in many colors. “We wanted roses that future first families may want to choose from their own personal taste,” the landscape architect adds.
Oehme, van Sweden’s study identifies numerous pre-renovation challenges, from historically poor drainage (the site needed to be made level, as much as nine inches higher) to shade concerns to the need for the modern technology requirements, since the space has become a regular stage for presidential announcements, news conferences, and the like. Mrs. Trump, for example, pre-recorded a speech in the garden that aired Tuesday evening during the virtual Republican National Convention.
“Kennedy’s main intention was to create a White House stage that would enter people’s living rooms through television,” Groft explains, adding that over the years “cables, utilities, and extension cords were destroying the planting beds because everything went from the building to the garden.” Today, a utility channel is concealed beneath the limestone walk that frames the lawn but which has alarmed many observers, even though it references a much wider unbuilt version that was intended to wrap the garden in the 1950s. The new walk, which is 36 inches wide and thus ADA compliant, also makes a better platform for high-heeled guests than soft sod.
“That was a totally sensible intervention,” says Sir Peter Crane, the president of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, where Mellon’s extensive archives were mined by the White House team. “Mrs. Mellon said that a garden is always in a state of becoming. Plants grow, some eventually fail, and others outgrow their space, all of which has implications for the rest of a garden. You really have to embrace a certain amount of change.”
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Which leads us back to the missing crab apples, the one alteration that has sparked the most ire. The trees were included on two plans presented to Mrs. Trump on February 12, 2020, but Guillot’s March 23 follow-up puts four-foot-tall standard roses in their place. Another Guillot document states, “It is thought that [standard roses] would replicate the design emphasis of the original planted 10 crabapple trees.” The horticultural deletion was “a committee decision,” the landscape designer informed me via email.
“It was a collective decision by the entire team to respond to the changed environment of the garden (nearly 60 years),” White House interior designer and grounds committee member Thammanoune Kannalikham responded in a text message. “It allows the roses to thrive (having increased in quantity from 19 to over 200), while bringing in the greater narrative of the colonnade into the design of the garden. Whereas previously these were two defined spaces. Today they are one.”
That decision, to my mind, is a mistake. The standard roses, a new variety called the White House Rose and which have not yet arrived, will not screen the West Wing’s oppressive architecture nor provide any transporting height; frankly, they will be the visual equivalent of speed bumps. (Still, Guillot says, “In time many of the planted shrub roses will grow larger to provide a sense of vertical emphasis in the parterres.”) They also will not embrace the Rose Garden as the crab apples had done, lending intimacy to an outdoor room that has been a favorite presidential escape. The trees also purposefully mirrored the 10 American hollies that punctuate the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, completed by Mellon in 1965, on the east side of the White House, so to my mind the hallmark crab apples should not have been jettisoned. If the boxwood parterres could be replanted with historical accuracy, why couldn’t those blushing trees be returned to their rightful place?
“Perhaps a future administration will reinsert the crab apples or another small flowering tree,” says Groft, adding that he considers the social media storm to be “just noise.” Potential presidents and spouses take note: Landscape architect Janice Parker, a board member of Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project, suggests Coralburst, a 10-foot-tall, pink-flowering crab apple that’s half the height of Katherine and more vigorous than Spring Snow. Gardens may change, but that’s no reason that their iconic—and highly popular—elements should be uprooted.
