By Krys Stefansky
Twitter people, sometimes you’re nuts.
Well, mostly always. But on Sunday you guys really lost it.
Somebody tweeted a “before and after” of the Rose Garden renovation at the White House. A photo of the old garden in spring, glorious with colorful tulips, and a shot of the freshly planted garden unveiled, in green and white and pastel.
And there was....mayhem online.
Nevermind that most tweeters can’t tell periwinkle from pelargonium. Or wanted tulips in August. They were incensed. INCENSED, I tell you!
It seems that the First Lady, who announced the redo of the Rose Garden in July - and with the help of private funds and dozens of illustrious advisors that included horticulturalists and landscape architects and, and, and…green thumbs of all genus and species - had just revealed a garden that a gazillion tweeters immediately hated. Hated with every fiber of their souls. Hated - let’s be honest here - because a Trump had led the project.
Nevermind that the Rose Garden had its last big redesign 60 years ago during the Kennedy administration. Forget that it had developed drainage issues, diseased plants, overgrown trees that blurred the architecture of the White House.
They wanted to KEEP IT, dangit.
Changing the garden to make it accessible for the disabled did not matter. Nor did adding infrastructure for better audiovisual and broadcasting ability.
Melania Trump had ruined their Rose Garden, had made it “colorless,” had written “KKK” with shrubs, had put in ugly sod.
True. That’s what they said. On a Sunday.
People, calm down.
Sod slabs always make a lawn look checkered until the grass grows into the cracks.
And those are zig-zagging, classic diamond-shaped bed divisions in the parterres (look it up, it’s a fancy French gardening word), not a secret code. Good grief.
And a freshly planted garden is never in full bloom right away. In the heat of August. And BESIDES, flowering in a garden varies. No plant blooms all the time. Not even a rose.
To everything there is a season. And that applies to First Ladies as well. This one, maybe as a parting gesture - we’ll know in November - reworked a space that she felt needed a change. Besides, I’d hazard a guess that Mrs. Trump has never done much gardening and that it was probably the White House gardeners and media types who noticed that things needed updating.
Some people questioned the project’s timing, calling it “bad.” You know what, this whole year has featured bad timing. Pick something. Anything. Bad timing. All of it.
So, before jumping into this compost pile and getting all dirty, sit down and distract yourself with the almost 250-page “The White House Rose Garden Landscape Report.” It has something for everyone. Honestly, it would make a great book. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that discussions began in the “Before Times” in November 2019 and that the redesign KEPT the overall plan done by Bunny Mellon at the Kennedys’ request back in the 1960s. The renewed garden even features the hybrid tea rose named ‘JFK,’ a nod to the past. So get your gardening pants out of a twist.
It’s a fascinating read for history buffs, art lovers and gardeners. You can pore over archival photos, maps, elevations, watercolors, and a historic timeline of the garden through the ages, an explanation of what was done over the years as well as during this renovation and much, much more. There’s even a detailed plant list that tells you which administration changed or deleted which plants and when.
Yes, believe it or not, this administration is not the only one to dare to change the Rose Garden when, in the past, plants outgrew their spaces, became diseased, or the spot need a little tweak here and there. Even Bunny Mellon herself suggested to the Reagans in 1981 that some of the crabapple trees be removed because they cast too much shade.
Gardeners refresh gardens all the time. Garden plants start out small, they flourish, grow too big and need changing out.
Gardeners know that.
The rest of you, go pull some weeds. Find something else to fret about.
