What is the significance of the rose garden?

**Tropicana** · 06-15-2014, 02:36 PM

Perhaps this should be transferred to the gardening section.

The President's Garden

Prior to 1902, there were extensive stables, housing horses and coaches, located on the grounds of the present-day Oval Office, Cabinet Room, and Rose Garden. During the 1902 Roosevelt renovation, First Lady Edith Roosevelt insisted on a proper colonial garden to help replace the conservatory rose house that had stood here.
The Rose Garden is based on a traditional 18th century American garden. The current design of the garden dates to the Kennedy Administration. President and Mrs. Kennedy were interested in having horticultural features that followed the traditions of Presidents Washington and Jefferson. The West Garden has been called the Rose Garden since 1913 when Mrs. Ellen Wilson replaced the existing colonial garden with a formal rose garden.
The Rose Garden features a rectangular grass panel surrounded by flower beds and crabapple trees. The garden is steps from the Oval Office and is the stage for numerous receptions, bill signings and media events annually.
More than 30 different types of tulips and grape hyacinth are planted in the flower beds that are framed and crisscrossed with boxwood. Lavender cotton, planted in the shape of diamonds, surrounds the crabapple trees.
The Rose Garden was once a formal flower garden, but it was eventually converted to a broad lawn surrounded by flower and shrub plantings so that presidents could hold press conferences out in the sunny, open area with the West Wing colonnade as a backdrop.

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Anyway what is the purpose of the rose garden and what type of events should be held there? The link shows garden parties, a wedding, a proposal, stroll in the garden by Presidents, and Caroline Kennedy being given a pony ride.

**Tropicana** · 06-15-2014, 02:40 PM

Here are examples of the criticism.

After Bergdahl’s release, a sickening spectacle in the Rose Garden

But the Rose Garden production sticks in my craw – Obama leaving with his arms around Bergdahl’s mother and father. So touching. So warm. So utterly repellent!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2014/06/04/after-bergdahls-release-a-sickening-spectacle-in-the-rose-garden/

Bergdahl Rose Garden Ceremony Was an Insult to Flacks

So why go ahead with the Rose Garden event? Obama had a perfectly legitimate story to tell: The American POW in Afghanistan had to be returned, irrespective of his character, and even at the cost of negotiating with terrorists or violating the law governing notification of Congress. (The Constitution affirms that the president is commander of the armed forces in wartime; and throughout American history presidents have assumed, correctly, that in practice they have essentially infinite wiggle room against any congressional attempts to restrain their power. The congressional notification scandal should have been a twelve-hour story.)So why bring Robert and Jani Bergdahl in for a photo-op that at best would look a bit strange, given Robert’s grooming and his public attempts to find common ground with his son’s captors? The story of how the Bergdahls ended up at the White House is pure turnip-truck territory. According to Time:

Their presence at the White House on Saturday was the apparent product of coincidence: the couple had visited the capitol for a Memorial Day event and then stayed in town for meetings in Congress. Had they been at home in Idaho when the deal was announced, they likely would not have flown to Washington to appear with Obama—and a key visual element of the drama, replayed endlessly on television, might not have occurred.

Does this happen often, that somebody with business before the president of the United States just happens to be in D.C. and gets invited to swing by the White House? Where did the Bergdahls stay during their D.C. visit, and who paid? How were they vetted before their appearance with the president — both for security and for political sensitivities — and how long did the process take? Did anybody at the White House know Robert Bergdahl was going to say “bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim,” along with the “Pashto phrase” that has been getting so much attention?
I am not damning Robert Bergdahl here; I hope never to find out how I would behave if my child were at the mercy of Muslim psychotics. But I am saying it was bafflingly stupid to have him buddy up with the president for international television coverage.
The conventional wisdom now is that the Bergdahl story was at first viewed as a triumph, until questions began to emerge. This is not exactly true. National Security Adviser Susan Rice was already on the defensive by Sunday morning, when she made her infamous claim that Bergdahl had served with “honor and distinction.” The Rose Garden ceremony was creepy at its heart. Had it not been creepy, there was still a roughly 100 percent probability that people would pay attention to the story.
The shilly-shallying and crabbed vocabulary coming out of the executive branch this workweek (State Department spokesman Marie Harf uncorked “fact pattern” Tuesday) indicate something worse than garden-variety presidential dishonesty. They indicate incompetence.
It is a cardinal rule of image management that you never roll out a story you may have to walk back. In this respect, strict and well-supported factual accuracy is even more important to a flack than it is to a journalist. A reporter who gets something wrong can generally make post-facto corrections without much fuss. But if you’re trying to make a client look good (or just less-bad), even minor inaccuracies are poisonous.