Michelle Obama has begun to dig up a 1,100 sq ft patch of the White House lawn where she intends to grow 55 varieties of vegetables for the first family’s meals and state dinners. Far from a novelty, her action makes her the latest in a long line of White House gardeners.
The first presidents of the US, whom Barack Obama so often quotes in his speeches, were all passionate gardeners: it was because George Washington missed his garden at Mount Vernon so much that he refused to serve a third term, setting the precedent for the two-term presidency.
John Adams was the first president to live in Washington DC. One of the first instructions he gave was for a vegetable garden to be laid out to the north-east side of the White House. Adams was a hands-on gardener who leaped into a pile of manure on Edgware Road (then just fields outside London) when he was the American minister in Britain in the 1780s to investigate its contents, proudly declaring that it was “not equal to mine”.
During Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, cows grazed in the grounds of the White House. He designed the west wing to include a greenhouse (though it was never built) and grew at his garden in Monticello 250 varieties of vegetables including tomatoes (one of the first Americans to do so), 27 varieties of kidney beans, 20 varieties of lettuce, Mexican peppers, artichokes, asparagus, sea kale, tarragon and cucumbers. His expertise was so respected that even the capital’s city surveyors asked his opinion on when and how to prune the trees along Pennsylvania Avenue.
Michelle Obama’s decision to plant a vegetable garden is an important political and symbolic statement about the future but it also echoes the beliefs of the founding fathers. They thought not only that gardening was the healthiest of all occupations but that the American people should be encouraged to grow a wide variety of vegetables to improve their diet.
When Jefferson judged his services to his country he ranked the introduction of olive trees to the US alongside his writing of the declaration of independence. The Obamas may be interested to look at his Garden Book in which he meticulously recorded all his vegetable failures and successes, for Jefferson said there is “not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me”. – guardian.co.uk