A place for diplomacy, major announcements, celebrations, a wedding and even rare private moments, the White House Rose Garden has a storied tradition as a historic site in the backyard of a home that is also a workplace and museum.
President Donald Trump’s summer renovations to the Rose Garden – paving in a grassy space to make it more like the patio at his Mar-a-Lago club – mark the latest iteration of a space that has evolved over time.
“It has fulfilled John F. Kennedy’s vision of a garden that would endure and whose atmosphere, with the subtlety of its ever-changing patterns, would suggest the ever-changing pattern of history itself,” Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon, who designed the modern Rose Garden during the Kennedy administration, wrote in 1983.
Gardens at the White House date back to the John Adams administration, with a redesign overseen by President Thomas Jefferson. Then in 1902, first lady Edith Roosevelt oversaw the installation of an ornate “colonial garden” on the west side of the residence, the site of the modern Rose Garden. In 1913, first lady Ellen Axson Wilson redesigned the garden to include hedges and roses.
But President John F. Kennedy envisioned the modern-day Rose Garden during a trip to Europe, calling on Mellon, a longtime friend, to design it when he returned stateside. Mellon drew inspiration from Magnolia trees outside New York City’s Frick Museum, Thomas Jefferson’s garden notes, and other National Park Service gardens, and the project was completed at the end of 1962.
The garden was beloved to the Kennedys, and the president chose it as the site of an event honoring the Mercury Astronauts in 1963. And it became a beloved space for other first families. First daughter Tricia Nixon married Edward Finch Cox at an altar atop the garden’s limestone steps in 1971. It’s been the setting of cultural moments, state dinners, diplomatic discussion and high-stakes presidential engagements with the press.
Trump sought to put his own mark on the garden with the decision to pave the grass, installing yellow-striped umbrellas mimicking the patio at the South Florida club he’s dubbed his “Winter White House.”
