History Unfolds With Walk Through the White House Gardens : Washington: Gardener’s 44 years on job develop expertise on Jefferson as a landscaper to Jacqueline Kennedy’s topiary hollies and Amy Carter’s treehouse.

The 8,000 Oxford red tulips surrounding the fountain on the South Lawn of the White House are blinding bright in the spring sun.

The lavender magnolia blossoms drift softly over the grass near the Rose Garden.

And head gardener Irvin Williams, commander in chief of this green domain, is content.

Gardener Williams, 68, holds 44 years of memories of presidents and cherry blossoms. Through the glorious gardens of the White House grounds, Williams can trace the history of the presidency.

On a walk through the gardens, he speaks of the struggle to keep the squirrels from devouring the 100,000 tulip bulbs planted each year. He mourns the historic trees lost to winter storms. He is cheered by the mallard ducklings that appear each spring with the tulips and the hyacinths.

William leads a walk to the 1826 John Quincy Adams elm, dead for three years but living on as a graft on an elm sapling. He and his gardeners fight to prolong the life of Andrew Jackson’s ancient Southern magnolia, transplanted from the President’s Tennessee estate in the mid-1830s in memory of his wife, Rachel.

John Adams, the first President to live here, inherited acres of grounds littered with construction debris. His successor, Thomas Jefferson, a passionate gardener, planned the first landscaping.

Each President added something--a new tree, a fountain, a bench in a shady spot, and, in modern times, a putting green, a horseshoe pit, a swimming pool, a tennis court.

A survey commissioned by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 gave the grounds their contemporary look. Roosevelt’s gardeners opened up the view to the south to frame the still unbuilt Jefferson Memorial on the Tidal Basin.

There are now more than 400 trees and 4,700 shrubs on the White House grounds, which cover 18 acres inside the iron fences and 2.5 acres between the East Wing and the Treasury. Thirty-two of those trees were planted by presidents or their wives. And each year the gardeners plant those 100,000 donated spring bulbs.

“When the tulips at the South Fountain go they’re replaced with 1,500 geranium and salvia; that’s our summer show,” Williams said. “We’ll come back in September with chrysanthemums.”

To do the planting, weeding, trimming, and pruning, as well as maintain the drives and the outside Secret Service guard posts, the gardener has a staff of 18, including electricians and plumbers. Eight other gardeners tend a greenhouse elsewhere in the city.

“Gardening is my life,” Williams says as he conducts a tour around the garden mounds erected by Jefferson’s staff 190 years ago.

“It’s an awful lot of work,” he says. “What makes it so great is when people tell you how beautiful it is.”

And he adds another thought.

“We’re here to provide what the first family needs. But what’s great about the job is that our trees, our plants, our shrubs, know nothing about politics.”

Williams started working on White House garden projects in the Truman Administration and was asked to manage the grounds full time by the Kennedys, who “took great interest in wanting to improve the grounds.”

In the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden on the East Side of the White House, Williams points out the topiary hollies that frame springtime hyacinths, pansies and tulips.

He pushes aside an arrangement of potted plants to display the silver dedication plaque, its text in the former Mrs. Kennedy’s handwriting.

The white-painted iron chairs under the trees date to the administration of Millard Fillmore in the early 1850s. The concrete benches are believed to have their origins in Abraham Lincoln’s White House years. “Not really very comfortable,” the gardener says.

Williams considers the statue of a young girl that stands on the other side of a small rectangle of water, pointing out her gardener’s smock, trowel, watering can and the plant she hoists over her head.

“I see Caroline Kennedy in that statue,” Williams says. “She rode Macaroni, her pony, on the grounds near here every day.”

Williams moves south across the grass, a combination Kentucky bluegrass and fescue, a mixture tailored to help the lawns survive the oven-heat of Washington summers.

The gleaming black limousines of the presidential motorcade purr past the Jefferson mounds and Clinton emerges at the path leading to the Oval Office. Socks, the cat, leaps to greet him, trailing a long leash.

In their first White House year, the Clintons have already planted three trees: a willow oak, a little leaf linden and an American elm.

“Socks got all tangled up in the willow oak,” Williams says.

He points to the spreading limbs of an Atlas cedar. “That’s where Amy Carter’s tree house was. She would sleep out here at night.”

The trees are all neatly labeled and marked. Jimmy Carter insisted on the labels, Williams recalls.

“I didn’t tell him, but I had wanted to do it for years,” he says. “But if it hadn’t been for President Carter, they still wouldn’t be labeled. As it turned out, one of Amy’s school projects was tree identification.”

Williams moves onto the flagstone path shaded by low-hanging holly that leads to the White House children’s garden, given to the grounds by Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson at Christmas, 1968.

“Before it was used for that purpose, this is where Mrs. Kennedy had her trampoline,” Williams says. “She’d come down even in cold weather and use it.”

After the trampoline was gone, President Johnson installed a doghouse for his two beagles, named Him and Her.

The entrance to the children’s garden is marked by 17 bronze hand prints of presidential grandchildren. At the garden’s dedication, LBJ’s grandson, Patrick Nugent, “took off and ran in here and fell straight into that pool,” Williams recalls. “He was all smiles, wet or not.”

Walking back to the White House, Williams points out the horseshoe pit favored by George Bush, the putting green where Clinton practices his golf swings, the swimming pool built for Gerald R. Ford and the swing on the tall tree planted by Dwight D. Eisenhower.

And Williams has his little joke.

Near the windows of the Oval Office, protruding from the West Wing like the prow of a ship, is a bronze statue of a deer.

Williams said he placed it within view of the President’s desk because it reminds him of the sign Harry Truman kept on his desk: “The buck stops here.”