March 19 (UPI) — President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he plans to pave over the White House Rose Garden because “grass, it just doesn’t work.”
Trump talked about the changes during an interview with Fox News that aired Wednesday night.
1 of 4 | President Donald Trump delivers remarks on modernizing immigration system in the Rose Garden of the White House on May 16, 2019. File photo by Yuri Gripas/UPI | License Photo
Trump and Fox News host Laura Ingraham walked the grounds of the White House, and then he showed off changes in the Oval Office, including the addition of diminutive gold cherubs.
He said the Rose Garden is “supposed to have events — every event you have, it’s soaking wet, it’s soaking wet, and people can’t, and the women with the high heels, it just didn’t work.
“And we have a gorgeous stone and everything else, but, you know, we use it for press conferences, and it doesn’t work, because the people fall into the wet. … The roses stay, no, it’s the Rose Garden, all of this stays. It’s just the center section.”
Trump personally reviewed the plans for the Rose Garden recently with White House curators.
Last weekend, CNN reported that Trump plans to transform the garden into a patio-style seating area, much like the one at Mar-a-Lago, his private estate in Palm Beach, Fla.
Trump has made announcements at the Rose Garden, including the nomination of fellow Associate Amy Coney Barrett in September 2020.
The White House Rose Garden went from a colonial-style garden in 1903 to a formal rose garden in 1913 by first lady Ellen Wilson. It was redesigned in 1962 under the direction of first lady Jacqueline Kennedy.
In 2020, first lady Melania Trump commissioned an August 2020 renovation of the garden by Oehme, van Sweden and Perry Guillot. In the flower beds, white and pale pink rose bushes are intermixed with seasonal bulbs and annuals. The crabapple trees, added during the Kennedy redesign, were relocated elsewhere on the White House grounds.
Formal dinners such as State Dinners have taken place there.
President Richard Nixon‘s daughter, Tricia, married Edward Cox in the Rose Garden in 1971, the first such outdoor ceremony held at the White House. There were 400 guests.
In 2021, more than 50,000 people signed an online petition calling for first lady Jill Biden to restore the Rose Garden at the White House to its “former glory.”
Biden posted a photo of the White House Rose Garden on May 7, 2021.
Biden’s photo showed the sunlight filtering over the pink and white flowers planted along the White House colonnade.
“I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” written in 1967 by Joe South and popularized by singer Lynn Anderson in 1970, signifies there is not always happiness and ease, but rather hardships