There is the fragrance of desperation as the media effort to slander the First Lady got everything incorrect

It seems the derangement in the press to demean anything the president and his wife are connected with can be limitless. As Becca Lower mentioned there was an immediate backlash from the press when it was announced that the First Lady Melania Trump was unveiling the restored White House Rose Garden. Rather than praise, or at least some introspection as to what had been undertaken in the process, members of the media were content to simply lash out, and in so doing avoided anything resembling facts.

A number of journalists were content to just leap at the First Lady for trashing Jaqueline Kennedy’s beloved garden, for chopping down her cherry blossom trees, and for smearing the honor of John F. Kennedy. Some of these vaunted minds in the press felt they made a stinging point by showing pictures of the garden in full bloom during the Obama years and then showing the ”joyless’’, oblivious to growing seasons and the flower types.

They of course went as far to call the light colors of the new roses ”racist’’. Perhaps the pundit who planted the comment that typifies it all was one of our faves, Ana Navarro.

This woman.

In March, as Pandemic began, it was a tennis pavilion.

Now, as +175,000 -and climbing- American lives and millions of livelihoods have been lost, she unveils new & NOT improved Rose Garden.

She cut down Jackie’s trees!
I hope @DrBiden returns it to the way it was. https://t.co/zHC8wb0WRc

— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) August 23, 2020

But while all of these elevated minds in the press were busy telling us what to think about this affront to all that is respectable in life one thing they were not busy with was actually researching what they were barking about. It turns out that in selling us the story of Melania waking up and deciding to hop on a John Deer earth loader and race around with the bucket lowered to grass level, these horticulture experts in the press had managed to get just about every aspect of their accusations wrong.

For starters, this was a long, months-in-the-works project, involving the National Parks Service, historians, and the man recognized as the nation’s foremost grounds keeping expert. The Rose Garden was actually long in need of repairs and renovations and Melania – a huge fan of Jaqueline Kennedy – strove to have them restore the garden to its 1962 design splendor. So much for that ”Fascist redesign’’.

The trees in question were not cherry blossoms for starters, and they were not chopped down. Some trees were boxwoods and they were coming under distress from  disease. Those have been relocated with the hope of being rejuvenated and then relocated on the grounds. The other trees were the crabapples, lined up 5 on each side. These had been replaced over the years, so those were not ”Kennedy’s trees’’ any longer. They were relocated because another tree on the property planted in the LBJ administration was causing shade problems today.

Other major changes have been an entirely new drainage system, as poor runoff has led to annual needed resodding, and root problems for the plants. New underground wiring was also run for the benefit of the media events. Another ”hateful’’ aspect has been the addition of paver walkways along both sides, which now makes access to the Rose Garden wheelchair friendly. 

As for the iconic rose plants there had been significant need for the renovation there as well. Over time many of the shrubs had died off and there were barely over a dozen remaining. This new planting involves 200 rose bushes, returning the sprawling coverage it held in past years. There is also an issue for those journalists complaining about the supposedly racist hue of some of those new blossoms.

Prominent will be the fragrant white tea variety, known popularly as the JFK White Rose.

So Melania did not trash Jackie’s garden, she did not chop down her trees, she did not remove cherry blossoms, and all the effort was made to return the garden to its original design glory – which is being called a fascist creation, with Kennedy’s species of flower deemed racist. Considering all of the outrage we were subjected to over this I am at a loss to see which complaint any of these alleged journalists made turned out to be accurate.