A Permanent Oval Office Occupant

By KURT ANDERSEN

Presidents come and go, but the Swedish ivy stays

Even at this time of year, Washington, D.C., is crawling with flowers and plants. Though the city is now consumed by manic post-election talk, the local flora manage to get an awful lot of attention. Civic boosters tend to be horticultural zealots as well. And they have a point: Washington is high spirited and blithe, by Washington's standards, when its greenswards are green and the vast federal flower patches are blooming. Just a few weeks ago in Rock Creek Park, for instance, the National Park Service had a Dixieland band and a blue-grass group come out and celebrate the fall foliage. The moment spring begins, you may be sure, Washingtonians will turn emphatic about the glorious forsythia, the jonquils and daffodils and, of course, all the perfect cherry blossoms. They go on and on about the dogwoods, the fields of hyacinths and azaleas, the quarter-million tulips planted near the Tidal Basin. Special pilgrimages are urged on visitors: not just the National Arboretum--precious camellias! amazing bonsai!--but the wonders of Dumbarton Oaks and the little garden at the foot of Capitol Hill. Washington, in sum, is very serious, even about its plants.

If there is a hierarchy among Washington's plants, those on the 19 acres around the White House, like osmanthus and purple winter creeper, must be the swells, the botanical elite of the city, maybe of the nation. And one plant is at the top of that heap. No other in history has been more photographed, more glimpsed in person by the world's high and mighty, more privy (if a plant can by privy) to the portentous intimacies of world politics, than a certain Swedish ivy (Plectranthus australis) that dwells deep inside the Executive Mansion.

The Oval Office may be the headiest place in America. When the President, sitting in his desk chair at the southern tip of the oval, stares dead ahead to the far wall, he sees The Plant. Anywhere else it would be a robust but unremarkable Swedish ivy. But there on the marble mantelpiece, day after consequential day, it basks in the power and the glory. No matter who has been inaugurated since 1961, The Plant has always stayed.

Sure, other plants live in the Oval Office--palms on the floor, half a dozen dwarf spathiphyllum, sometimes pots of ornamental peppers. The Swedish ivy, however, is above the rest, literally and figuratively. As the most important houseplant on earth, it gets, one imagines, special attention, the perquisites of position. Perhaps the leaves are individually daubed and polished each evening, watered with Maryland spring water specially sluiced in through titanium pipes, pruned by Kyoto-trained specialists. Maybe an occasional Marine Band rendition of Hail to the Schefflera!

On the contrary, the temporary residents around the White House are practically oblivious to The Plant and its remarkable place smack at the center of modern history. "But why, why do you want to look at it?" demanded Sheila Tate, the First Lady's press secretary, of a visiting Swedish ivy enthusiast. "Larry Speakes thinks it's all pretty silly." Silly? Granted that there are, on any given day, matters of more urgency that the White House spokesman has had tb address ("Larry," a TV news reporter asked, "does the President have an astrologer or numerologist?"), but The Plant is not irrelevant to the day's great issues.

For if that ivy could talk, what stories it could tell; if it told them, of course, it could be subject to prosecution for unauthorized disclosure of classified information. The supreme virtue of plants in Government is their inherent discretion. The Swedish ivy, given its potential for leaks, is an Administration team player first and last. No one in the White House admits, on the record, talking to The Plant. But hundreds of highly placed people--Presidents and despots, Prime Ministers and Kings, undersecretaries of everything--have gabbed for countless hours just a long, trembling tendril away. The two armchairs are not only for ceremonial photo opportunities: the leaders really do transact business there, and just a bit further away, the daily business of state is conducted by the President with his underlings.

In The Plant's presence, then, Sadat of Egypt must have quibbled over the meaning of "homeland," and Yugoslavia's Tito suggested his definition of "nonaligned." The Plant--silent, green--was there as Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone of Japan warned of trade tensions; as Jose Napoleon Duarte of El Salvador was encouraged on his precarious quest; and in September, as Ronald Reagan and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko worried over nuclear missiles and killer satellites. In 1979, Swedish Prime Minister Ola Ullsten, probably unaware that he was so close to a Swedish ivy (the Swedes did nothing more than attach their name to Plectranthus, which is native to Africa and Australia), chatted with Jimmy Carter about Nobel Prizes or shifting Riksdag majorities or whatever it is such untroubled allies discuss. Always, The Plant was there.

Well, not quite always. In fact, Swedish ivy arrived in the exalted place only during the Kennedy Administration, succeeding Ike's grape ivies and plebeian philodendrons. "At first we used it strictly experimentally," recalls Chief White House Horticulturalist Irv Williams, who has served six Presidents. His lieutenant for more than a decade, Supervisory White House Horticulturalist Dale Haney, actually tends it. "You need something with a little body there on the mantel," he says in his Virginia Tidewater drawl. "Some shape, some real foliage."

Haney agrees that The Plant is remarkable for its ability to endure, unwiltingly, the merciless glare of publicity. "It is amazing," he says. "It's almost maintenance free for us. It seems to love the light"--the nearest window, facing the Rose Garden, is several yards to its left--"and we've had no health problems with it, except sometimes it gets a little discolored in the center. During the winter, that fireplace is burning all the time when the President's in there, but The Plant does just fine anyway." Haney is too humble. Swedish ivies are hardy, but the Oval Office Swedish ivy gets the supervisory horticulturalist's conscientious care. For the rest of the year, as the fireplace begins to blaze, he will come in with water every day at 7 a.m. sharp. He dribbles on liquid fertilizer (20-20-20) once a month and gives a misting every six weeks. Insecticides seem unnecessary; Haney follows his own no-first-use policy and says he has not had any bugs at all, but remains vigilant against red spider mites. He prunes it back now and again, especially on top, so it will not obscure the portrait of Washington (Charles Wilson Peale, 1776) hanging behind.

It would be difficult, and maybe impossible, for any one Swedish ivy to serve indefinitely as The Plant, the apotheosis of U.S. household horticulture. The limelight, surely, would become a burden. The fluorescent light evidently does: after a few months in the Oval Office, every Swedish ivy is permitted to recuperate amid wooden trays of more esoteric brethren--red gloxinias, Jerusalem cherries, scented geraniums--in natural light and fresh air, up in the little greenhouse on the third floor. Typically, there are two Swedish ivies in rotation, each serving about five tours of duty on the front line.

Presidents, of course, may serve no more than two terms. When a particular plant grows too large or stalky to be The Plant, it is retired to stud, often out on the East Lawn. Healthy-looking cuttings are nipped off and replanted; a fresh Plant candidate is born. Thus no single Swedish ivy, it is true, has sat in the Oval Office for two decades. (Did anyone mind that there were multiple Lassies?) Rather, a hereditary Plant dynasty serves on the President's mantel: from cuttings a new generation is propagated, then another and another, on and on.

Nepotism may be unAmerican, but each Plant has served faultlessly. None has died on duty. And Haney declines to believe that one ever will. "I don't think it would die overnight," he says. "You'd see it coming. You could probably save it--or give it a good try." History, assuming it has a sense of whimsy, would demand no less. --By Kurt Andersen