Some people have been complaining about the cool and fairly wet spring we’ve been having here in the northeast. Not me! Have these people noticed how gloriously verdant everything is? What an effusion of roses has been climbing the trellises across Brooklyn! True, the sun-loving perennials are biding their time, but how nice to let the hose languish a few more weeks, before the scorching rays of summer fully set in and everything needs a regular dousing.
Today we look back at a famous Vogue feature on the White House garden, theoretically a landscape belonging to the nation, but also one in which only a handful of individuals have exerted their vision. In February 1967, Valentine Lawford and photographer Horst P Horst visited to chronicle the evolution of those illustrious grounds. Lawford, who was a former British diplomat, took care the underline the importance of the official lawns and flower beds—from the evocation of pastoral Jeffersonian ideals to the reinvention under the Kennedys. It was Kennedy, Lawford points out, who resuscitated a garden “unworthy of the President of the United States. He was convinced that a good Presidential garden could be a serious psychological asset during diplomatic conversations.”
Read the story here, and then go get your garden gloves. |
