The Bidens have their picture taken with the Carters. The Cameraman, uh… used the wrong lens.
Looks like a wide angle in a small space.
@Satsuki:
Fucking Melania. Trump was bad enough, did she have to ruin the White House too?
Okay, I'm actually going to have to defend them on this one. This one is not on Melania. She has plenty of other things to right criticize for, but the garden isn't one of them.
Some clarifications are necessary, so hold on to your secateurs: The Rose Garden as the world has long known it is a bit of a creative sham, sort of like the White House itself, of which little historic interior fabric remained after President Harry S. Truman gutted the place. Hand-wringers might be interested to know that Mellon’s original crab apples, a 1928 pale-pink variety called Katherine, disappeared for good in 2003, when, having grown too large, they were replaced with younger examples. Those were replaced in 2010 and again in 2019, when Katherine was superseded by Spring Snow, a Canadian white-flowering variety that dates to 1963. The latter trees, which didn’t thrive, are reportedly being relocated elsewhere on the White House property.
Now seems the time to address the unfounded accusation declaring that Mrs. Trump and her committees heartlessly tossed out roses dating back to 1913, when Edith Carow Roosevelt’s fussy 1902 Colonial Garden became Ellen Axson Wilson’s classical rose garden, which was the first iteration actually dedicated to those flowers. By the time Kennedy was elected, only a few Tom Thumb shrub roses, a 1930s variety, remained. Mellon’s 1962 garden included some roses but many more perennials and herbs. (President Kennedy wanted plants that grew at Monticello.) The only Kennedy-era vegetation that has survived over the years are the saucer magnolias that mark the rectangular garden’s corners and an osmanthus hedge that runs along the West Colonnade.
Also the hedges have been replaced multiple times, and roses actually do not grow very well there at all despite the name. The folks in charge were adamant that the design match the original intent, so it looks like it did in the 60's, the exact same layout, just updated.
They needed to do updates and renovations ANYWAY for a variety of reasons including modernizing the drainage and making it camera accessible.
The flowers and trees are all still intact off-site being preserved. The trees were ALWAYS planned to be put back in, regardless of who was in office. So they're going to end up back in there eventually, with or without a petition.
The biggest issue is that the renovation was in early summer, instead of in spring. So when they unveiled it… all the flowers were gone. Because they wouldn't be blooming then anyway. So the before and after pictures all look incredibly severe.
It's hard to find pictures of it right now, because the only thing that turns up are those sharp contrast images, but you look in the back of a Biden speech in the garden and it looks better lalready.
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/the-full-story-behind-the-controversial-rose-garden-redesign
Melania can get the blame for the horrid christmas decorations and failing at Easter and being an awful person, but the Rose Garden was not her fault, or not entirely her fault at any rate.
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