Living: A Permanent Oval Office Occupant

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Haney agrees that The Plant is remarkable for its ability to endure, unwiltingly, the merciless glare of publicity. "It is amazing," he says. "It's almost maintenance free for us. It seems to love the light"—the nearest window, facing the Rose Garden, is several yards to its left—"and we've had no health problems with it, except sometimes it gets a little discolored in the center. During the winter, that fireplace is burning all the time when the President's in there, but The Plant does just fine anyway." Haney is too humble. Swedish ivies are hardy, but the Oval Office Swedish ivy gets the supervisory horticulturalist's conscientious care. For the rest of the year, as the fireplace begins to blaze, he will come in with water every day at 7 a.m. sharp. He dribbles on liquid fertilizer (20-20-20) once a month and gives a misting every six weeks. Insecticides seem unnecessary; Haney follows his own no-first-use policy and says he has not had any bugs at all, but remains vigilant against red spider mites. He prunes it back now and again, especially on top, so it will not obscure the portrait of Washington (Charles Wilson Peale, 1776) hanging behind.

It would be difficult, and maybe impossible, for any one Swedish ivy to serve indefinitely as The Plant, the apotheosis of U.S. household horticulture. The limelight, surely, would become a burden. The fluorescent light evidently does: after a few months in the Oval Office, every Swedish ivy is permitted to recuperate amid wooden trays of more esoteric brethren—red gloxinias, Jerusalem cherries, scented geraniums—in natural light and fresh air, up in the little greenhouse on the third floor. Typically, there are two Swedish ivies in rotation, each serving about five tours of duty on the front line.

Presidents, of course, may serve no more than two terms. When a particular plant grows too large or stalky to be The Plant, it is retired to stud, often out on the East Lawn. Healthy-looking cuttings are nipped off and replanted; a fresh Plant candidate is born. Thus no single Swedish ivy, it is true, has sat in the Oval Office for two decades. (Did anyone mind that there were multiple Lassies?) Rather, a hereditary Plant dynasty serves on the President's mantel: from cuttings a new generation is propagated, then another and another, on and on.

Nepotism may be unAmerican, but each Plant has served faultlessly. None has died on duty. And Haney declines to believe that one ever will. "I don't think it would die overnight," he says. "You'd see it coming. You could probably save it—or give it a good try." History, assuming it has a sense of whimsy, would demand no less. —By Kurt Andersen