White House Garden: my thoughts
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By Choi Yearn-hong
It is well known that first ladies have changed the White House furniture and interior decorations for their residence during their husbands’ presidential terms, four years or eight years. Mr. and Mrs. John F. Kennedy were shocked to see the deteriorating ugly Pennsylvania Avenue on the way to the U.S. Congressional lawn for her husband’s inauguration ceremony. After the inauguration ceremony, Jacqueline Kennedy ordered the White House staff to restore Pennsylvania Avenue, which connects the White House and Congress. Lady Bird Johnson was known for her contributions in upgrading the Washington area’s national park under management of the Department of Interior.
Michelle Obama has distinguished herself as the first lady in educating and enlightening the American people about their fitness, including black children in particular. She has emphasized proper exercise and diet on many occasions since the Obama administration began. She also used part of the White House garden to grow vegetables, and harvested organic foods. Her smiling face with tomatoes from her garden was picturesque to the news media. She is very popular among the American people for her preaching about fitness and diet. I think her efforts to create a kitchen garden deserve attention.
My mother always created a vegetable garden at every house in which she lived. Her garden was big in her country house, and small in her city house. Daejeon was a medium-sized city when I was young. We called the garden Teotbat, just outside the kitchen, where she easily grew green onions, lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes, among others. They were all organic foods. Teotbat did not provide all the vegetables our family needed, but it was my mother’s leisurely small farm for the family.
I miss my mother’s garden, so I admire Michelle Obama’s kitchen garden. When I first came to the United States, I admired the American house with the big green lawn. Big mansions and more expensive houses have bigger lawns appropriate to the lot. When I owned a house, the lawn was very costly to maintain on a college professor’s income. Mowing the lawn every week from spring to autumn was not cheap at all. Now, I hire a lawn company to seed and fertilize annually, and mow weekly. Maintaining a green lawn is the duty of the middle-class American family. I planted all season- green trees surrounding my house, but I still pay handsomely to the lawn company. I don’t have any choice. If my lawn grass is tall, then I feel my neighbors will complain to me.
I hope Michelle Obama proposes converting lawns into vegetable gardens at all American houses. Then, she will be more popular than she is now. She is already more popular than her husband. Who knows? She may run the office of the president in the future. See Hillary Clinton? Hillary did not do very much as the first lady. So Michelle may have a better chance to run someday for the White House.
I am an environmentalist who wants nature conservation to include tall grass, but that is not possible under the current community culture. So I have to maintain decency with a short and neat lawn. The only breakthrough may be the total conversion of the lawn into a vegetable garden. That would be justifiable with Michelle Obama’s new campaign to change every lawn into a vegetable garden all over the U.S. Then, I would have to quickly learn small-scale farming from my mother, who is now in heaven.
Small farming still requires more than conscious preparation for each season. Even if I make my small farm from my lawn, it may invite deer before harvesting season. They are coming to my house every night for their food. So small farming itself may not be possible for human good, but for the good of wild animals. The White House garden is well protected by the security guards 24 hours a day, and all year round.
As a matter of fact, I made my backyard a flower garden with a bamboo grove. In order to block my bamboo rooting into my neighbor’s yard, I made a painful underground wall not to allow the expansion of the bamboo grove. Bamboo has caused many American neighbors’ conflicts that resulted in court cases. Therefore, bamboo-growing is not acceptable for any American garden. But my wife loves the bamboo grove. So I keep it with hardship.
Lawns can be troublesome to some people. I am one of them. But I keep it, because I want to remain in the middle-class American community. Someone in high office should declare that, “We don’t need lawns; they are wasteful. We should convert all our lots for productive use.” That will be helpful to me and some other people. But all in all, I know converting lawns into gardens is not easy at all, even if the first lady declares a revolution against our lawns.
So I admire Korean Teotbat more from the United States.
Dr. Choi is a poet and an environmentalist who has contributed to The Korea Times since 1966.