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On the contrary, the temporary residents around the White House are practically oblivious to The Plant and its remarkable place smack at the center of modern history. "But why, why do you want to look at it?" demanded Sheila Tate, the First Lady's press secretary, of a visiting Swedish ivy enthusiast. "Larry Speakes thinks it's all pretty silly." Silly? Granted that there are, on any given day, matters of more urgency that the White House spokesman has had tb address ("Larry," a TV news reporter asked, "does the President have an astrologer or numerologist?"), but The Plant is not irrelevant to the day's great issues.
For if that ivy could talk, what stories it could tell; if it told them, of course, it could be subject to prosecution for unauthorized disclosure of classified information. The supreme virtue of plants in Government is their inherent discretion. The Swedish ivy, given its potential for leaks, is an Administration team player first and last. No one in the White House admits, on the record, talking to The Plant. But hundreds of highly placed people—Presidents and despots, Prime Ministers and Kings, undersecretaries of everything—have gabbed for countless hours just a long, trembling tendril away. The two armchairs are not only for ceremonial photo opportunities: the leaders really do transact business there, and just a bit further away, the daily business of state is conducted by the President with his underlings.
In The Plant's presence, then, Sadat of Egypt must have quibbled over the meaning of "homeland," and Yugoslavia's Tito suggested his definition of "nonaligned." The Plant—silent, green—was there as Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone of Japan warned of trade tensions; as José Napoleón Duarte of El Salvador was encouraged on his precarious quest; and in September, as Ronald Reagan and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko worried over nuclear missiles and killer satellites. In 1979, Swedish Prime Minister Ola Ullsten, probably unaware that he was so close to a Swedish ivy (the Swedes did nothing more than attach their name to Plectranthus, which is native to Africa and Australia), chatted with Jimmy Carter about Nobel Prizes or shifting Riksdag majorities or whatever it is such untroubled allies discuss. Always, The Plant was there.
Well, not quite always. In fact, Swedish ivy arrived in the exalted place only during the Kennedy Administration, succeeding Ike's grape ivies and plebeian philodendrons. "At first we used it strictly experimentally," recalls Chief White House Horticulturalist Irv Williams, who has served six Presidents. His lieutenant for more than a decade, Supervisory White House Horticulturalist Dale Haney, actually tends it. "You need something with a little body there on the mantel," he says in his Virginia Tidewater drawl. "Some shape, some real foliage."