Micheál Martin had more to worry about at the time, I’m sure, but when the Taoiseach sat down with President Trump in the Oval Office last week, there was something conspicuously missing from the mantelpiece behind him.
It had been gone since at least February, in fact. But it became breaking news (of a kind) on Tuesday last, when the Washington Post ran a feature headlined: “The Growing Legend of the Missing Oval Office Ivy.”
As reporter Maura Judkis wrote, many things have been disappearing in and around Washington lately: including thousands of government jobs, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) schemes, and Black Lives Matter Plaza.
But Judkis continued: “In the commotion of Donald Trump’s return to office, it’s easy to overlook a smaller thing that has vanished: the Swedish ivy plant in the Oval Office.
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“The ivy sat atop the fireplace mantel for most of the past 50 years, providing a backdrop for meetings with countless leaders and foreign dignitaries at the White House. It has filtered the air breathed by Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Whitney Houston.
“When the president stared straight ahead from the Resolute Desk, the ivy is what he saw.”
Yes, the plant had changed shape many times, she pointed out. Under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, it was “unkempt and bushy”, then was “pruned back” during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.
More recently, it became “a wide, sprawling hedge” for Barack Obama but was then “cut down to two smaller plants for Donald Trump’s first term”.
Well actually, as I can confirm because I was in the Oval Office myself at the time (see my attached photo), there were three distinct clumps on the mantelpiece in March 2019, when Leo Varadkar visited Trump.
But the point holds that, in one form or other, the plant was a permanent fixture. Hence Bill Clinton’s decorator, from a 1994 interview: “That ivy has been there forever. We can’t touch it.”
“Forever” was poetic licence. At most, the plant has been there since the 1960s. And this is where the “legend” of the Post’s headline comes in. Because the traditional origin story dates from an interview given by the same Bill Clinton in Dublin in 2000, when he said this:
“In the Oval Office of the president, on the mantel, there is a beautiful ivy plant which has been there for almost 40 years now. It was given to President Kennedy by the then-Irish ambassador to the United States as an enduring sign of the affection between our two people.”
There are some problems with that, however, as the Post also pointed out. For one, the oldest dateable photograph featuring the Oval Office ivy is from the mid-1970s, when Gerald Ford was president. But there is also this: Why would an Irish ambassador give the White House a plant called “Swedish ivy”?
Our man in Washington during the Kennedy years was Thomas J Kiernan. And I see from The Irish Times archive that as well as the usual shamrock, he once gifted JFK a specially modified “coat of arms and Kennedy family tree”.
But the Kennedy tree – literally or metaphorically - was not ivy. On the contrary, the coat of arms featured “two olive branches” (something that definitely wouldn’t fit with Trump’s decor).
One outside possibility, I suggest, is that the Irish ambassador also visited the White House in October, on or near the 6th. Then he might well have presented ivy in memory of Charles Stewart Parnell, whose funeral on that date is still commemorated as Ivy Day.
But would our Ambassador have given Swedish ivy? Well, in favour of my Parnellite theory, it turns out that Swedish ivy is not strictly speaking Swedish.
Of less convenience to me, however, is that it’s not ivy either. It’s not even a member of the ivy league (as it were), belonging instead to the family lamiacie, the best-known members of which are mint and sage.
In any case, the mystery of the misnamed Oval Office plant’s origins remains. But at least the question of its whereabouts – first raised in print by the left-wing magazine Mother Jones – has now been resolved.
It seems that Trump’s decorators just moved it back out to the greenhouse, whence its various iterations emerged. In keeping with the president’s style, the mantelpiece is now decorated with golden ornaments.
Opponents of Trump will see his banishment of the “ivy” as another example of the man’s crassness and lack of taste. It must be said, however, that Parnell would probably have agreed with him.
The great Irish nationalist leader hated all things green, a colour he thought unlucky. He was superstitious in general. But the prasinophobia (from the Greek for green, prasinos) may have been rooted in a justified fear of dyes.
That was an era, after all, where your wallpaper could kill you. Hence the theory of Parnellite journalist and politician William O’Brien. Parnell’s dread of all things green was sincere, O’Brien thought, and “arose, in my judgement, chiefly from a fear of arsenical poisoning”.
