Maura Judkis
In the commotion of Donald Trump’s return to office, it’s easy to overlook a smaller thing that has vanished: the Swedish ivy plant in the Oval Office.
The ivy sat atop the fireplace mantel for most of the past 50 years, providing a backdrop for meetings with countless leaders and foreign dignitaries at the White House. It has filtered the air breathed by Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Whitney Houston.
When the president stared straight ahead from the Resolute Desk, the ivy is what he saw.
It has taken several shapes over the years. Under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter the ivy was unkempt and bushy. It was pruned back during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. It features prominently in Bill Clinton’s swaggish presidential portrait. It was split into three neat topiary-esque shrubs for George W Bush. It became a wide, sprawling hedge for Barack Obama (who swapped it out, temporarily, for a different varietal of ivy). It was cut down to two smaller plants for Donald Trump’s first term in office. For Joe Biden, the ivy crept wider and longer again.
“That ivy has been there forever,” said the Clintons’ decorator, Kaki Hockersmith, in a 1994 interview with the Dallas Morning News. “We can’t touch it.”
It was there when President Trump moved back into the Oval Office earlier this year. By February, it was gone
In its place, conspicuously, are five gleaming decorative vessels, seemingly made of gold. A Maryland writer named Jamie Kirkpatrick noticed them earlier this month, around the time of the contentious Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, when the mantel of vessels was visible in nearly every photograph of Trump and Vice President Vance arguing with the president of Ukraine.
What were those? Kirkpatrick wondered. Golf trophies?
Kirkpatrick noticed the change because he has a propagation of the Swedish ivy - a gift from a friend of a friend who worked at the White House - in his Eastern Shore home.
Countless people have descendants of the ivy in their homes, in Washington and across the country. Clippings have been offered over the years as parting gifts to White House staffers, who propagate them at home and give them to friends, who in turn give clippings to other friends, and on and on.
In Chicago, sonography student Kayla Benker has a propagation in a ceramic White House-shaped pot, a reminder of her 2011 internship in the Obama photo office, where she got to know many staff members who had worked through multiple administrations.
The ivy, she says, is the plant version of the staff’s devotion and continuity.
Rico Gardaphe’s Brooklyn apartment is “overrun” by the ivy, he says - a souvenir from his time working in the Office of Presidential Correspondence under Obama.
“I kept a spreadsheet of all the people I’ve ever worked with,” Gardaphe says. “It’s been my goal to get every one of them a clipping.” He thinks he’s given out about 50 so far. He also maintains an Instagram account, @ovalofficeivy, dedicated to posting photos of the historic plant and its offspring.
Gardaphe noticed the disappearance in early February, but “it was at the very bottom of things that I decided to get upset about.”
There is an ivy offspring in Rae Ryan’s Nashville greenhouse, a gift from a neighbour who had a friend who had a sister who interned at the White House under Obama - “So I personally feel like I got the best vintage, frankly,” she says, as if the plant absorbs the spirit of whichever president breathes near it.
The current president has made some people automatically suspicious.
“The Country’s Most Famous Houseplant Is Missing,” Mother Jones said in a March 8 headline.
Did the ivy “die of neglect,” one user posted last week, “or is it sitting in a golden planter in Mar-a-Lago?”
The ivy comes with a short backstory. Here it is, as told by President Clinton at a 2000 reception in Dublin:
“In the Oval Office of the President on the mantel, there is a beautiful ivy plant which has been there for almost 40 years now. It was given to President Kennedy by the then-Irish Ambassador to the United States as an enduring sign of the affection between our two people.”
This story, repeated by numerous publications, is now lore. Many people treasure their ivy clippings as a relic - an enduring tendril - of Camelot.
“It makes me feel a little bit like a part of history,” says Kirkpatrick. “Maybe some great-great-great grandmother or grandfather of my little cutting was in the White House the day [Kennedy] signed the Peace Corps Act.”
The problem is that this story might not be true.
“Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to find evidence of the plant’s origins,” says Abigail Malangone, an archivist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, via email. There are records and photographs of the Irish ambassador presenting Kennedy with a vase of shamrocks, she notes - but not ivy.
The plant may still date back to Kennedy, but no evidence proves it. Barbara Ann Perry, a Kennedy scholar, says the first dated photo she can find of the ivy in the Oval Office is from the Ford administration.
“It does not make sense, does it? For an Irish ambassador to give Swedish ivy,” says Perry, who co-directs the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “I mean, it’s still possible that the Swedish ambassador gave President Kennedy this gift.”
But the plant isn’t even Swedish. Nor is it actually ivy. Plectranthus verticillatus originates from South Africa, and is classified in the same plant family as mint and sage. There was never just one ivy, either. Multiple Swedish ivies take their turn on the mantel, residing in a greenhouse between tours of duty.
But let’s not complicate the romance. Political symbols often represent what people want to be true, Perry says. Relics are symbols that connect us to an idealized past, but a plant is more than a relic. It’s a little life.
“People want that living representation of having a piece” of the White House, says Perry. “I think that’s a religious feeling. It’s sort of the civic religion of our country, based on the scripture of our Constitution.”
“I do feel that this is a little bit of a legacy I can pass on,” says Kirkpatrick, of his propagations on the Eastern Shore. “I have a responsibility to share this. You know, pay it forward.”
What, then, is the symbolism of greenery replaced by gold?
No, the gold vessels are not golf trophies. They’re artifacts from the White House’s own collection. The central gilded bronze basket, called a compotier, was made in France around 1815 and gifted to the Nixon administration in 1973. To its left and right are a pair of urns from the Monroe Plateau, a set of gilded tableware acquired by President James Monroe in 1817, shortly after the British burned the White House. The outer two sets are from a collection acquired during the Eisenhower administration that are usually displayed in the Vermeil Room, which is named after its contents (vermeil is gilded silver).
Neither the White House nor the White House Historical Association would answer questions about the vessels or the ivy, leaving us to speculate.
Presidents redecorate the Oval Office to suit their tastes, and Trump’s certainly veers toward the baroque. His Trump Tower residence was outfitted in gold. He has worn golden hard hats at his construction sites, and buckles his seat belts with gold-plated buckles on “Trump Force One.” Last month, Trump announced plans to sell U.S. visas for $5 million, a plan his administration is calling a “gold card.”
He just really, really likes gold, and maybe it’s as simple as that.
Or could the plant’s association with Obama have something to do with its disappearance? After all, Kehinde Wiley’s official portrait of Obama shows him amid a backdrop of greenery including ivy (though it does not appear to be Swedish ivy; perhaps it’s Obama’s substitute plant). Many of the cuttings around the country can be traced back to the Obama administration.
We don’t know the answers to these questions, but we do know what happened to the ivy. (Sorry, we could’ve told you sooner, but what’s lore without a little mystery or suspense?) No, the White House staff did not chuck the Swedish ivy in the trash. And no, Trump did not send it to a planter at Mar-a-Lago.
After days of calls and emails to dozens of White House denizens, past and present, we reached someone who could fill us in (on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media).
The Swedish ivy has been relocated to a greenhouse on White House property, where backup versions have long resided, out of the public eye.
So the disappearance of the ivy isn’t really a mystery. It’s a metaphor - a metaphor that’s corny and obvious, yes, but also needed. The ivy may be gone from the Oval Office, for now, but it lives on with its stewards. Its tendrils twine around Washington and stretch across the country. Its greenery may be in less prominent spaces, but it continues to grow. A chain of hands keeps passing it down. And as long as there are people willing to water and nourish and share it, the ivy will not die.
It just needs a little light.