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| Photo Credit: AP. |
WASHINGTON (AP) — There were the young women in fresh fall coats, a guy in a suit, hoodied parents with kids, all maneuvering for selfies with the White House south facade. The plant fans and the history fans leaned in to admire the perennials and centuries-old trees on the lawns where Commander the dog lolls and Marine One the helicopter lands.
Again and
again, Secret Service agents rose to the challenge of the White House fall
garden tour over the weekend, open to all comers with a free ticket: “Off the
grass!” one agent in black uniform shouted, squaring his shoulders, not for the
first time, not for the last. A straying visitor hopped back on the path.
An estimated
30,000 people in all strolled through the White House’s black metal gates on
Saturday and Sunday, as the red-uniformed Marine Band, overlooking the South
Lawn, played everyone through.
With some of
the most formidable of temporary security fencing down and pandemic
restrictions eased, the tours on a not-rainy weekend were a throwback to the
White House’s early days, when there were fewer restrictions on access to the
People’s House. For a weekend, the tour sheared off some of the distance
between the nation’s executive and a curious, divided public.
GARDENING
The annual
fall and spring tours open the gates on gardens more than 200 years old — the
oldest continually maintained landscape in the United States, says the National
Park Service
“It’s sort
of a bucket list thing to check off,” said Ryan Harrison, 29. He and wife
Lindsey Harrison, 30, came hours early from their Washington home to be in line
at 7:07 a.m. Saturday. They wanted to see the Rose Garden, and maybe more.
“There’s a
chance the president will walk out and say hello,” she said.
President
Joe Biden, in fact, was at his home in Delaware.
There were
limits to the hospitality: Grounds crews wheeled out evergreens in containers
to block the path of a garden in the back, where the palm prints of grandkids
and paw prints of pets offer a glimpse of the lives of the White House
residents.
The human
occupants weren’t on hand, but the bees in the beehives were, scouting out
head-high orange marigolds in the flourishing, blooming patch that hosts the
kitchen vegetable garden started by Michelle Obama and the cutting-flower
garden started by Jill Biden.
John Adams
is credited with preparing ground for the first White House vegetable garden,
although a reelection loss meant he left before the 1801 spring planting
season, historians say. He hired white and Black workers during his time as
president, although the White House Historical Association notes that other
presidents brought Black people they held in slavery to work as gardeners.
The current
head groundskeeper is Dale Haney, who was honored by the Bidens last week for
his 50 years of service at the White House. In the minutes when the tour areas
were open to journalists on the weekend but not yet the public at large, one
gardener hauled off a last cart of limbs and leaves. Another tidied up with
what appeared to be a battery-powered leaf blower (an aha moment for gardeners
in these days of controversy over gasoline-powered ones).
Public
access to the White House grounds may have hit its apogee in 1837, when Andrew
Jackson celebrated George Washington’s birthday by throwing open the White
House doors to all — men and boys in frock coats and straw hats, women and
girls in bonnets -— who wanted a share of a donated 1,400-pound (635-kilogram)
cheese.
“For hours
did a crowd of men, women and boys hack at the cheese, many taking large hunks
of it away with them,” a journalist from the time wrote. “Nothing else was
talked about at Washington that day.”
World War
II, 9/11 and other security concerns steadily carved away at access for
ordinary Americans.
When first
lady Pat Nixon started the spring and fall garden tours in 1973, the White
House itself still was open to visitors lining up for tours.
These days,
members of the public generally are asked to go through congressional offices
for spots on White House tours. Families enter a lottery for a spot in the annual
White House Easter egg roll.
For the
garden tour weekends, the line wraps around the metal gates surrounding about
18 acres (7 hectares).
A VIP group
that came in at the head of Saturday’s garden tour was allowed close enough to
peer in the windows, getting in the backdrop of people’s photos of a serene
Rose Garden brightened by yellow flowers, and raising questions about just who
was getting first gnaw on the big cheese.
Rashida
Holman-Jones, an administrator at the Washington-area SEED School, came through
the gates with her 7-year-old twin girls, a 17-year-old student, Simona Weimer,
and others.
Weimer was
great with the compost and pitching in overall at the school’s garden,
Holman-Jones said. Holman-Jones got involved with school gardening as a direct
outgrowth of Michelle Obama’s gardening-friendly drive for better nutrition for
kids.
At the time,
“I wasn’t into gardening,” she said. “But I was really, really into Michelle
Obama.”
In the White
House gardens this past weekend, well-pruned boxwood-like plantings kept all
the red, green, yellow, purple and orange, pollinator-friendly fall blooms in
line.
Topiary was
big. Photos and plaques marked trees planted by past presidents, with Queen
Elizabeth II, Hillary Clinton and others also part of the planting pedigrees.
The oldest trees are identified as two southern magnolias, planted by Jackson.
On Saturday,
a man in a suit edged close to the White House exterior. A Secret Service agent
looming alongside hip-high shrubbery told him to get back.
Holman-Jones,
a friend, and their beaming little girls pressed in for their photo. Weimer,
from Ethiopia, got a photo for the folks back home, capturing her moment at the
White House.