History Prior to 1902, the area of the present-day Oval Office, Cabinet Room, and Rose Garden contained extensive stables housing horses and coaches. There was also a conservatory rose house in the area. During the 1902 Roosevelt renovation of the White House, First Lady
Edith Roosevelt established a "proper colonial garden" in place of the conservatory. In 1935, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt commissioned
Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to redesign the garden, and he installed cast iron furniture pieces.
Renovations performed in 1961 In 1961, during the
John F. Kennedy administration, the garden was largely redesigned by
Rachel Lambert Mellon concurrently with extensive repair work to the East Garden. Mellon created a space with a more defined central lawn, bordered by flower beds that were planted in a
French formal garden style while largely using American botanical specimens. Although individual plantings are changed frequently according to the wishes of the incumbent administration, until 2020 the garden followed the same layout first established by Mellon, where each flower bed was planted with a series of pale pink 'Katherine'
crabapples and
Littleleaf lindens bordered by low diamond-shaped hedges of thyme. (The 'Katherine' crabapples were replaced in 2019 with a white-flowering variety called Spring Snow, which did not do well. Ever since then, roses have served as the primary flowering plants in the garden, including large numbers of '
Queen Elizabeth' grandiflora roses, along with the hybrid tea roses '
Pascali', '
Pat Nixon', and '
King's Ransom'. A shrub rose, '
Nevada', also served to add a cool note of white coloration to the landscaping. Seasonal flowers are further interspersed to add nearly year-round color and variety to the garden. Some of the Spring blooming bulbs planted in the Rose Garden include jonquil, daffodil, fritillaria, grape hyacinth, tulips, chionodoxa and squill. Summer blooming annuals are changed on a near yearly basis. In the fall, chrysanthemum and flowering kale bring color leading all the way up until the early winter days.
Renovations performed in 2020 First Lady
Melania Trump commissioned an August 2020 renovation of the garden by
Oehme, van Sweden and Perry Guillot. In the flower beds, white and pale pink rose bushes are intermixed with seasonal bulbs and annuals, including the
Pope John Paul II Rose in honor of the first time a
pope visited the White House in 1979. A new limestone walk, wide to comply with the
Americans with Disabilities Act, was laid around the borders of the garden. opined that the renovation was an "evisceration" of the Rose Garden, and that "decades of American history [was] made to disappear."
Vogue reported that many
Twitter users described the renovation as "sterile, bland, and devoid of any joy".
The Washington Post, however, stated that the renovation was "long overdue" and noted several problems with the Rose Garden's pre-renovation landscaping, including a poorly-drained lawn which required annual replacement, the die-off of multiple rose bushes "to the point where only a dozen or so remained", and the parterres' susceptibility to boxwood blight. White House interior designer and Grounds Committee member Thammanoune Kannalikham described the decision as a "collective" one, made “by the entire team to respond to the changed environment of the garden ... It allows the roses to thrive (having increased in quantity from 19 to over 200), while bringing in the greater narrative of the colonnade into the design of the garden." The abstract sculpture
Floor Frame by
Isamu Noguchi is displayed under a
magnolia tree in the Rose Garden. It was unveiled by Melania Trump and
Stewart McLaurin, the director of the White House Historical Association in November 2020. It was the first art work by an
Asian American artist to enter the official collection of the
White House.
Renovations performed in 2025 In 2025, President
Donald Trump ordered that the grass of the garden be replaced with a patio. Stone tiles were laid in a diamond pattern in July of that year. The patio stone was sourced from
Indiana limestone quarries. Solar-powered in-ground lighting was also added along the new patio, which some praised as eco-conscious but others criticized as disrupting the historical atmosphere. At the first event held in the renovated Rose Garden on September 5, 2025, President Trump declared, "We call it the Rose Garden Club. And it’s a club for senators, for congresspeople and for people in Washington, and frankly, people that can bring peace and success to our country." A bronze statue of
George Washington made from a cast of a marble sculpture by
Jean-Antoine Houdon, formerly displayed at the
Washington Monument, was moved to the far side of the Rose Garden in October 2025. ==Official and informal use==