If Only I Could Have a Hand in The Rose Garden

I have two green thumbs.

And The Rose Garden will need tending to this spring.

I’ll be minding my own gardens all spring and summer, but if I could have a hand in The Rose Garden, my goal would be to show all Americans, red, purple, and blue, how growing some food is good for our physical health and our mental health. Tending to a garden is about tending to our body—through the physical activity involved and by eating the very healthiest produce. And tending to a garden is about nurturing our mind—by positively stimulating all five senses; providing a sense of accomplishment, pride, and mastery; and strengthening social connectedness (there’s nothing better for deepening connections to neighbors than baskets of zucchini and buckets of zinnias).

In The Rose Garden, my role would be gardener and farmer, yes, but I would be wearing my other hats as a psychiatrist and a preventive medicine and lifestyle medicine doctor as well. Regardless of outrageous decisions made inside The House, The Garden would be about fortifying Americans’ bodies and minds by growing some food. I would want an abundance of strawberries for a big jam session at The White House, televised, in mid-June; then, plenty of brambles (blackberries and raspberries) for jamming again in July and August. The vegetable beds would be trimmed in our most beloved flowers—statice, cosmos, snapdragons, celosia, amaranth, and zinnias—to adorn both The Garden itself and the inner offices of the world’s most powerful decisionmakers. I think some flowers would help; in fact, all of us need vases of gorgeous fresh-cut flowers this year. Most importantly, The Garden would have eight beds dedicated to eight families of plants that provide the vast majority of our vegetables, which all of us should be familiar with. It would be great learning for cooks and chefs, for grocery store shoppers like you and me, and for potential backyard gardeners from coast to coast.

Getting to know these eight families of vegetables, all on display in this most special garden, would help us all grow healthier. What are these eight families? I give more detail—along with a lot of quirky scientific facts and a perhaps too many irreverent stories—in Veggie Smarts. But here’s a quick summary:

The Brassicas like arugula, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, collards, kale, radishes, turnips, and so many other vitamin-, mineral-, and phytonutrient-packed superfoods. The Alliums, meaning garlic, onions, shallots, leeks, scallions, and chives, all of which make our other veggies taste so delicious. The Legumes, focusing on green beans and peas given The Garden’s too-tight dimensions for growing the multitude of protein-packed dried beans. The Chenopods, named for the shape of their leaves: beets, beet greens, spinach, and Swiss chard, as well as the pseudocereals amaranth and quinoa—every member of this family being a superfood. The Aster Greens, my term, as I needed an appropriate surname for the lettuces and the four chicories (catalogna or Italian dandelion, escarole, frisée or curly endive, and radicchio), just a few members of an enormous family of beautiful flowering plants. The Umbellifers, which are a group of cousins named for the shape of their fanciful flowers (pretty, lacy, flat umbrellas like those of wild carrots, or Queen Anne’s lace): carrots, celeriac, celery, Florence fennel or finocchio, lovage, and parsnips, as well as herbs including angelica, anise, caraway, chervil, cilantro, cumin, dill, and parsley, among others. The Cucurbits: cucumbers, pattypan squash, yellow squash, zucchini, watermelons, cantaloupes, honeydew melons, winter squash, and pumpkins, among others. I would want to grow plenty of melons in The Rose Garden. The Nightshades family gives us eggplants, peppers, tomatillos, ground cherries, potatoes, and perhaps most importantly among all the vegetables cited here, tomatoes.

Among more than 400 families of flowering plants, nearly all of our veggies are situated in just these eight families, each one providing a different constellation of vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients—antioxidants and immune-boosting and inflammation-busting plant compounds. Eating vegetables from across the eight families, ideally daily, holds promise for fortifying our bodies and our minds. In The Rose Garden, beyond being a gardener, farmer, mental health doctor, and physical health doctor, I would be a teacher to anyone willing to roll up their sleeves and get dirty.

Being the first ever Farmer General / Surgeon General of the White House's Rose Garden would be a lot of work. There would be plenty of raking, digging, soil mixing, sowing seeds, planting seedlings, training vines on trellises, pruning, watering, harvesting, and, yes, weeding. And yes, I would probably be raucous and disorderly toward the West Wing staff. But perhaps I could get some cabinet members to pitch in, showing us the jointly shared value in growing some of our own food. Some of the weeds we’d pull and deliver straight to the chef of The House: garlic mustard from the Brassicas, wild onions from the Alliums, and super-nutritious lamb’s quarters and pigweed from the Chenopods. The President could set an example by eating more weeds and educating the public about it. The Garden would be about cooking at home, from scratch, eating the cleanest and most sustainable food on earth (from just outside the kitchen door), and contributing virtually no carbon footprint compared to the local grocery store’s produce trucked some 3,000 miles.

This, to me, is what gardening is about. Growing smart, eating smartly, and sharing in our bounties—and our veggie smarts—around the table, from across the road or across the aisle.

Move over Melania. Let me have a hand in The Rose Garden.