Tiny cuttings from the most important house in the nation

The plant I’d been obsessed with for nearly a year arrived in a small box that had been casually tossed in the mailbox on a very cold February day. Whether it would be alive or frozen mush was very much in question.

I unwrapped the tiny cuttings with the care of a museum conservator, quickly nipped the browning stem ends and popped them in a jar of water by my kitchen sink. 

Last weekend, six weeks after they arrived, I planted a pair of cuttings, now sporting fine white roots in a tiny pot. If they thrive, I hope to be the next gardener to carry on the tradition of sharing a plant that’s been on hand for some of the most important moments in history.

I wrote about the Oval Office ivy (which is really Swedish ivy, aka Plectranthus verticillatus) in this space in March 2025, when the Washington Post reported that the plant was no longer displayed in the Oval Office as it had been since the Kennedy adminstration. It lives on, however, in the many plants grown from cuttings in the homes of former White House staffers and those they’ve shared it with.

Since then I’ve been not so casually seeking a piece of this historic plant for myself.

As it turns out, I’m not alone. 

When former Nashville, Tenn., mayor Megan Barry held a public clipping giveaway in December, a line stretched around the block, and her mother plant, which dates to the Obama administration, was a fraction of its healthy size a few hours later.

Had I known about the event, I would have considered a road trip to Nashville, but I missed it by days. Barry was beseiged by other gardeners as desperate as I was to own a piece of history and formed a Facebook group called Clippings of Hope aimed at connecting people with growing cuttings to those who want them. 

I shared Barry’s story as an update to my original column on Substack in February, and within a day I had an email that I could have only dreamed of. A reader named Lisa had an Oval Office ivy that she’d grown from a cutting herself, and she was willing to send a bit of it my way.

The provenance of my clipping goes back to Lisa’s friend, who developed the first White House website during the Clinton administration. She, and other staffers, received a clipping of the Oval Office ivy from the actual Oval Office as a parting gift at the end of Clinton’s term.

Now that I’ve acquired this tiny piece of history, my focus is on growing it into a beautiful plant so that one day I’ll be able to repeatedly cut that plant into tiny pieces to share again and again. Because the only thing that can be better than growing this plant from the People’s House would be sharing it with as many people as possible.