White House Gardens

Before the new dog Bo stole the news cycle, Michelle Obama excited and baffled gardeners with her new South Lawn vegetable patch. Excited, because Mrs. Obama promised to showcase organic vegetable growing and healthy eating on a global stage. Baffled because the press photos revealed the first lady and a group of school children wielding rakes. Without a leaf in sight. 


How did this righteous crew plan to eliminate 1,100 square feet of tenacious lawn? And what would Mrs. Obama’s impeccable outfit — thigh-length wrap sweater and patent leather boots — look like when she was done?

It turns out the White House has been talking about kitchen gardening for a long time. In general, presidential gardening has been two parts hortatory, one part horticulture. 

For instance, virtually every news account of mentioned the example set by Eleanor Roosevelt. But according to David M. Tucker, author of “Kitchen Gardening in America,” Mrs. Roosevelt’s personal Victory Garden did not immediately reap a bumper crop of good will in Washington. Instead, Mr. Tucker writes, Mrs. Roosevelt’s plan ran into the opposition of Agriculture secretary Claude Wickard:

“When the wife of the president of the United States asked Wickard to find her a suitable gardening site on the White House lawn, Wickard’s two experts were so severe that they rejected all possibilities. The site near the tennis courts had such tight red clay that only years of adding barnyard manure could turn the soil into a garden. Moving some of the flowers from the Rose Garden would violate the secretary’s recommendations against tearing up ornamentals to grow vegetables.” 

The agriculture department had its reasons: Mr. Wickard gave speeches arguing that unschooled backyard gardeners would flounder, wasting valuable wartime pesticides and chemicals. More than that, Mr. Tucker argues, the secretary recalled the gardening fervor—and the bureaucratic battles over resources–that had broken out during the First World War. And so it wasn’t until 1943 that Mrs. Roosevelt got her garden, Mr. Tucker writes—though she didn’t tend it herself. 

Both Woodrow Wilson and Gerald Ford called upon red-blooded Americans to garden for the good of the country. But both leaders, in a sense, were jumping onto a fast-rolling haywagon and pretending to steer. 

An inflationary panic in the winter of 1916-17 sparked food riots and protests among housewives in New York City. Russian Jews on the Lower East Side, Mr. Tucker writes, upset pushcarts and assaulted food peddlers. 

It was in April, then, that President Wilson announced his full-throated backing for home food cultivation. “Everyone who creates or cultivates a garden helps, and helps greatly, to solve the problem of the feeding of the nations,” Wilson pronounced. 

By contrast, President Ford’s Whip Inflation Now gardens of the mid-1970s represented an attempt to galvanize public support for a fight against an abstract enemy. In his book “Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s”, Yanek Mieczkowski cites the encouragement of Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson. According to the book, Senator Nelson proposed that Ford: “ speak to the country with a message which says that uncontrolled inflation is a great threat to the security of the country—as great as World War II—and that the same kind of national cooperation will be required to meet the threat.”

Yet it’s hard to imagine that Ford’s pleadings alone motivated 49 percent of American households to grow their own food—the postwar gardening high reached in 1975. (It was probably the spiraling prices, the worrying unemployment, and the gas lines.) And indeed, after inflation had been, well, whipped, the ranks of food gardeners quickly dropped to 30 percent, according to research from the National Gardening Association. That’s around where we stand today.

What hopes have you invested in the success of the White House garden? Can anyone—please–cook up a catchier nickname than the one I’ve been giving it, FLOTUS Fields (for First Lady of the United States)? And should her husband serve for two terms, do you expect Mrs. Obama will still be pulling weeds in 2015? Finally, what are the odds she’ll be dressed like the rest of us: in a pair of jeans with holes in inconvenient places, and a misshapen t-shirt on top?