[quote] i will always hate her for destroying Jackies rose garden. I wish Biden had replanted it exactly how it was
I greatly dislike Melania and loathe Trump with every fiber of my being but as an experienced gardener I can confidently say Melania did not destroy Jackie’s rose garden.
The crabapple trees had been removed and replaced 3 times already. They were too big for that small space. As they grew, they shaded out the roses. You can’t plant roses under a large tree. They need sun. I found out the hard way. I moved my roses from the front to the back of my garden because I was tired of being ripped to shreds by thorns when tending to other plants. My beautiful rose bushes died….not enough sun.
So they decided not to replant the trees again in order to give sun to the roses and to stop having to replace the trees every time they got big enough to shade the roses.
As for the rose bushes, they’ve been replaced over the years, too. Rose bushes don’t last forever. But look at the garden - there are plenty of rose bushes there. They’re right there in front of your eyes. 👀
As for the flowers - the pictures Michael Beschloss keeps posting are: one of the garden in full bloom inspring, and the other photo was taken in high summer.
Spring ain’t summer.
Completely different flowers. In spring the WH garden has colorful tulips, colorful hyacinths and other flowers that grow from bulbs. (None are native to North America, btw). Then the flowers die and the WH gardeners dig up the bulbs. Do they recycle them the next year? Do they throw them away? I don’t know. But they definitely dig them up and plant summer flowers.
In the rose garden there are white, red and pink roses. There are also two native North American pollinator flowers - blue agastache and white spider flower (cleome). So basically you have red, white and blue colored plants in the rose garden. Coincidence? No, of course not. It’s deliberately symbolic.
Bees love Agastache and hummingbirds love cleome because they are nectar producing, as are many (but not all) roses.
So these 2 pollinator friendly plants are native - but they’re not beautiful. Most pollinator friendly native North American plants aren’t beautiful. Again, as a gardener, I have found out over the years that the most reliable perennial pollinator plants are ….kind of dull … and usually short-lived (like 3 years at most). Nobody is ever impressed with my garden. But the bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, finches, and unfortunately deer and rabbits, love my garden.
There is no way Melania Trump planned and planted that garden. Because there’s no way she knows anything about native North American pollinator plants. Professional gardeners planned and planted the garden, and they deliberately put native plants in there. Because nobody would choose blue Agastache and white cleome for their beauty. There are far prettier non-native plants that are sterile hybrids which contribute absolutely nothing to the local biome….. but they look spectacular.
In high summer these plants start to look a little overworked. Droopy. Dry. They’re supposed to look that way because they did their job. They fed animals and insects.
I have never seen a photo of the WH garden in autumn. I bet they dig up all the summer plants and replace with chrysanthemums, which I hate. I hate chrysanthemums because there are so, so many attractive autumn plants, yet corporate America decreed through big box stores that only chrysanthemums may be used.
To me, the WH garden isn’t even a garden, it’s just a flower bed. Especially since so many of the plants are grown in greenhouses and plunked down into holes in the ground, fully grown.