Margaret Truman Read Online Free PDF Page A

the handprints of presidential grandchildrenset in the paths of the Children’s Garden.
Credit: White House Historical Association
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    The President’s Park
    I SELDOM VISIT the White House without pausing to contemplate a venerable tree that graces the south front. Known as the Jackson magnolia after the president who planted it, those gnarled old limbs provided shade on the muggy August day when Harry S Truman had lunch with Franklin D. Roosevelt not long after Dad had been nominated to run with FDR in 1944.
    It did not take my father long to realize the rumors about Mr. Roosevelt’s declining health were all too true. The president’s hand shook so violently, he could not spoon sugar into his coffee. FDR asked Dad how he was going to campaign. When Dad said he was thinking of using a plane, the president shook his head. “One of us has to stay alive,” he said. That was the day Harry S Truman realized he might become president of the United States.
    That meeting is a good example of why no story of the White House can be complete without an exploration of the acres of grass and gardens and trees that surround it. The history of the grounds is as full of unexpected twists and turns as the history of the mansion itself.
    The first president to take a serious interest in the White House’s potential for natural beauty was Thomas Jefferson. He planned a landscaped park with small groves of trees and clumps of rhododendron and other shrubs. He marked off one area as the “garden” where vegetables and flowers would grow, fenced off about eight acres of the land set aside for a “President’s Park,” and made plans to build a high stone wall at the south end of the property.
    Although he never got around to doing much about his plan, Jefferson planted scores of seedling trees. Sadly, most of his plantings were trampled by British troops and the army of workmen who arrived to rebuild the mansion after the British burned it.
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    The next president to exert an influence on the grounds was John Quincy Adams, who had a lifelong interest in horticulture. Soon after John Quincy took office, he fired Charles Bizet, whom James Monroe had hired as “Gardener to the President of the U. States,” and replaced him with John Ousley, who became almost as permanent a part of the mansion’s landscape as the trees and flowers he planted.
    Under President Adams’s guidance, Ousley devised a park that included seedlings gathered from all parts of the country. Soon walnut, persimmon, willow, oak, and other trees were growing on the White House grounds and a two-acre garden had been planted near the south entrance gate.
    The president took an intense interest in Ousley’s work and often arose at dawn to do some digging of his own. One morning he wrote of planting “eighteen whole red-cherries.” By the summer of 1827, a delighted Adams was bragging to his diary that the two acres contained over a thousand different trees, shrubs, hedges, flowers, and vegetables.
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    John Quincy’s successor, Andrew Jackson, had more ambitious plans for the White House grounds. Jackson called in the public gardener of the city of Washington, Jemmy Maher, to help him overhaul the President’s Park.
    At some point in the course of this work, the White House’s most famous tree, the Jackson magnolia, was supposedly planted. There is no written record of its arrival, and some experts have expressed doubts about the tree’s origin. One thing we know for certain is that Jemmy Maher and his workmen planted dozens of trees. Among his best selections were horse chestnuts, which produced beautiful white blossoms that added an exotic dimension to the White House grounds.
    Another clever purchase, warmly approved by Jackson, was a miniature fire engine, which could be trundled around the grounds, spraying water on the grass and plants along its way. Between the “watering