The growing legend of the missing Oval Office ivy [View all]

Things have been disappearing in Washington. Jobs are being eliminated. Entire agencies are on the brink. Black Lives Matter Plaza was jackhammered away. USAID documents were ordered to be shredded. And, as federal buildings go up for sale, will government artwork be lost in the shuffle? 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. 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 Trump moved back into the Oval Office earlier this year. By February, it was gone. n its place, conspicuously, are seven gleaming decorative objects, 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 Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, when the mantel was visible in nearly every photograph of Trump and Vice President JD Vance arguing with Zelensky.

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.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2025/03/18/oval-office-swedish-ivy-obama-plant-trump-missing-kennedy-gold-mantel/

Loves gold, hates living things. Trees, plants, humans.