Garden makeover?

You have just moved into your house and strangers are telling you what to do with the garden.

That might rankle you, except the property is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington — and the occupants are Barack Obama and his family — and his domestic decisions are suddenly everyone's business.

The home vegetable garden has taken on enormous political and environmental symbolism. Voices in the local-food movement have formed a chorus urging the Obamas to dig up a good chunk of the South Lawn for a garden to feed the first family and local food banks.

If Americans planted wartime victory gardens again, the argument goes, we would reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and unsustainable agricultural practices, feed our families with cheaper, more nutritious food and reduce obesity and disease.

The Obama interest

It will be interesting to see whether the Obamas respond to the calls. Eleanor Roosevelt installed a victory garden in 1943 and Woodrow Wilson turned the South Lawn over to grazing sheep during the First World War but most of the landscape changes made by First Families — and there have been many over the years — were for their own needs.

Theodore Roosevelt took down a magnificent array of greenhouses and conservatories to build the West Wing in 1902.

Many presidential landscape changes had little to do with horticulture, reflecting instead the recreational interests of families that must live, work, entertain and decompress in a guarded compound.

Personal preferences

Obama, a fitness freak, wants to install a basketball court. Bill Clinton had a jogging track constructed, Gerald Ford installed an outdoor swimming pool and Dwight Eisenhower, the inveterate golfer, a putting green.

Since the Clinton administration, the executive chef has been harvesting produce from a small vegetable garden on the roof.

Roger Doiron, an organic gardener and food activist in Scarborough, Maine, says the White House needs a vegetable garden that is large enough to register in the public's imagination.

If it were built, he said, the ultimate size and location would have to be worked out by the various parties involved, including the Obamas and the National Park Service.

Washington landscape architect James van Sweden installed such a garden for a couple near Chestertown, Maryland, after they all toured England looking for the right model.

They were most comfortable in one measuring 75 feet by 150 feet, enclosing about a quarter-acre. It was replicated on the Eastern Shore with a wall to keep out deer.

It has a Chinese pavilion that holds six chaises and arbours dripping with grapevines. “It's very American in feeling,'' van Sweden said.

Such a garden at the White House would be ideal for seasonal and perennial vegetables, herbs, berries and espaliered fruit trees, as well as cut flowers. “It would be marvellous and a private place to sit,'' van Sweden said.

Changes over the years

The White House landscape is an arboretum of historical and commemorative trees and the layout derives from a plan devised in the 1930s for Franklin Roosevelt by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr, forming a vista to the south and using trees to frame the view of the distant Jefferson Memorial.

The garden staff is dedicated but the predominant form of ornamental gardening involves patterns of bedding annuals that extend north to Lafayette Park.

It has remained unchanged for years: red tulips bounded by grape hyacinths in the spring, to be ripped out and replaced with scarlet sage and dusty miller for the summer. Bedding mums arrive for the autumn. It is like a time warp from the 1950s.

Forward-looking peers

Other civic landscapes have become forward-looking gardens of more natural character, speaking to the sustainability of green spaces.

Millennium Park in Chicago, the Obamas' hometown, is an example of thoughtful and vital municipal landscaping in the 21st century.

A tenth of the park is occupied by the Lurie Garden, a celebration of plants bounded by sculptural hedges and composed by designers with international reputations: landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson, plantsman Piet Oudolf and set designer Robert Israel.

Food for thought.