by Betsy Klein |
When the historic East Wing of the White House was suddenly demolished last year to make way for President Donald Trump’s new ballroom construction, another piece of history was taken down with it.
The Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, dedicated in 1965 by first lady Lady Bird Johnson in honor of her predecessor’s stewardship of the White House, was dismantled — its iconic I.M. Pei-designed pergola put into storage; its trees sent to various nurseries for preservation.
Kennedy’s grandson would like a word with the president about that.
“President Trump has a deep obsession with my family — from the East Wing, to the Rose Garden, the Kennedy Garden, to the plane, the list goes on. But he is attacking all families each and every day with higher costs, careless war, and a deep corruption,” Jack Schlossberg told CNN.
Schlossberg, who is running for Congress as a Democrat, continued: “My grandmother believed in the people of this nation. Every single person. She wanted us to see gardens, and color, and the brightness of life. What we have now is darkness.”
More than six decades after Johnson commended the “unfailing taste of the gifted and gracious Jacqueline Kennedy,” plans for the landscaping around the new ballroom are coming into focus, unveiled in detail by landscape architect Rick Parisi during a presentation to the National Capital Planning Commission this month. And landscape architects and other historic preservation experts are taking issue with key aspects of the designs.
Ballroom-adjacent garden plans
According to the updated designs from the East Wing construction project, a new garden will sit atop the former site of the Kennedy Garden and expand south across the length of the sprawling new ballroom. It will feature a grand staircase, a round brick patio with “original Mount Vernon brick,” large granite paver pathways, and four topiary holly trees from the former garden. A fountain from the original garden will be relocated and incorporated into the space.
The South Lawn driveway, part of a historic design incorporating ellipses, will be reconfigured, its circular shape disturbed and pinched in on one side to make way for the 89,000-square-foot ballroom.
That part of the plan is also the subject of much controversy.
Parisi told the NCPC the “most striking” thing about the plan is the “opportunity to really expand on one of the most beautiful things” of the old garden with ornamental, symmetrical patterned plant beds and extensive annual and perennial plantings.
“The goal we do have is to kind of re-create some of the splendor that you had in that east garden.”
Yet the new plans offer little visual reference to the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden — a grassy lawn surrounded by hedges and seasonal florals where Barron Trump once played soccer; Commander Biden, the previous president’s German shepherd, went off-leash; and presidents and their families have sought respite and fresh air.
There are no plans to move the Kennedy Garden to another location on the White House grounds, a White House official said, though some of the trees and shrubbery will be replanted. The I.M. Pei pergola, the official added, “is being preserved and will try to be incorporated in the new landscape design,” though it has not been included in any of the plans.
Circular reasoning
During the public comment portion of the NCPC meeting, which was overwhelmingly negative, experts took aim at the asymmetry of the new driveway design.
The landscape designs of the White House have followed what’s known as the Olmsted Plan for nearly a century. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1935, the plan governed changes to White House grounds around a design organized by a series of ellipses.
Priya Jain, an architect and chair of the Heritage Conservation Committee of the Society of Architectural Historians, said the “incongruous sharp bend” of the driveway “is not only visually jarring, but strays from the historic design of softly curved pathways.”
Rob Cagnetta, a building restoration specialist and president of Heritage Restoration, said the interrupted driveway design “modifies the spatial organization of the east side of the White House grounds.”
“This is not as simply as an aesthetic concern. Architecture communicates meaning. The White House is one of the most recognizable civic buildings in the world, and its physical prominence reflects its role as the center of American executive leadership. Any new construction within this should reinforce that meaning, rather than dilute it,” Cagnetta said.
Charles Birnbaum, a landscape architect and president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, told CNN the plans were “contradictory to everything that the secretary of the Interior established.”
Birnbaum spent 15 years as coordinator of the National Park Service Historic Landscape Initiative and wrote the rulebook on the matter: “Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes.”
Asked whether the design would have been approved during his tenure, he said, “It wouldn’t have been approved by the agencies. No.”
“The cultural landscape guidelines, first and foremost, are about visual and spatial relationships. So if you think about the plan that we looked at, so many of the axial visual relationships have been severed,” Birnbaum said.
He pointed to impacts to the circulation of the driveway, trees that have been torn down, and landscape features like the I.M. Pei pergola and the structure of the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden.
“There’s no way this would have ever been approved,” he concluded.
Birnbaum also took issue with how the asymmetric driveway departs from the Olmsted Plan.
“You’ve got to look at … the greater notion of what the ellipse represents and what it could have represented to Olmsted, when you think of these notions of balance and harmony, cycles in nature, fluidity there. This is destroying that,” he said.
The White House has been an evolving home and workplace for centuries, and there have been constant changes to the grounds, which have housed a greenhouse, a flock of sheep and jungle gyms over the years.
But unlike first lady Michelle Obama’s installation of a kitchen garden or even the changes Trump made to the Rose Garden last year, these new landscape plans are not easily reversible and do not operate within the National Park Service’s framework of standards for rehabilitation, Birnbaum said.
The Jackie Kennedy Garden: a brief history
The idea of a garden on the east side of the White House originated with President John F. Kennedy in 1962, according to landscape designer and longtime family friend Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon.
Mellon, who designed the White House Rose Garden, worked closely with Jackie Kennedy on the design for the East Garden, which would be visible to visitors on tours as they walked through the window-filled East Colonnade. The women wanted a “high hedge of linden trees” for shade, “a place for the children to play,” a “lawn large enough for a small croquet court or badminton net,” and perhaps “a small plot to plant fresh herbs” for the White House chef, Mellon wrote in a 1984 article for House & Garden.
Kennedy’s suggestion of croquet inspired Mellon to think about the rosebushes in “Alice in Wonderland,” along with topiary holly trees, both incorporated into the plans.
After President Kennedy’s assassination, Lady Bird Johnson invited Mellon to the White House, where they discussed resuming the East Garden plans and dedicating it to Jackie Kennedy in honor of her stewardship.
The garden, Johnson said in her audio diary, would be “a tribute to Jacqueline Kennedy for all that she did for the White House. I think that no accolade could be enough and am all for getting it done.”
One year later, Johnson unveiled the new garden and a plaque honoring Kennedy, who was represented by her mother, Janet Lee Auchincloss.
“I can’t think anything that could have more meaning to all the people who care about Jackie than to have this lovely garden as a memory of the years that she shared with (President Kennedy) here,” she said.
Since then, the garden has been a stop on White House tours, until they were paused and ultimately rerouted when the East Wing was demolished.
The suddenness of its disappearance was a surprise to its designer, too.
“We learned about the more recent Rose Garden renovations (completed in 2025), as well as the removal of the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, at the same time as the public did,” said a source familiar with Mellon’s archives.
Kennedy, Birnbaum said, “is a pillar of the modern preservation movement. And really, when you look at everything that this administration is doing, it’s saying, ‘We don’t care. We’re going to eradicate all of these histories, and we’re going to put a massive structure in a landscape that, in itself, is a symbol of democracy.’”
