Design and Horticulture
Pierre-Charles L'Enfant's 1793 plan of the city of Washington placed the President's House facing a convergence of radial avenues centered on the North Lawn. In 1850, landscape designer Andrew Jackson Davis attempted to soften the geometry of the L'Enfant plan.
In the mid-19th century a bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson was placed in middle of the lawn; it was replaced by a pool and "gurg" steam-driven fountain in 1871. Through the remainder of the 19th century the North Lawn was planted with increasingly complex seasonal "carpet" style flower bedding punctuated by tropical plants borrowed from the White House glass houses.
President Theodore Roosevelt, who had engaged the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White to reconfigure and rebuild part of the White House in 1902, was induced to simplify the grounds, removing what was increasingly seen as Victorian clutter. The bedding scheme on the North Lawn was greatly simplified. Later, in 1934, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt engaged Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. to evaluate the grounds and recommend changes. Olmsted understood the need to offer presidents and their families a modicum of privacy balancing with the requirement for public views of the White House. The Olmsted plan presented the landscape largely as seen today: retaining or planting large specimen trees and shrubs on the perimeter to create boundaries for visual privacy, but opened with generous sight lines of the house from north and south. The lawn is planted with a grass variety called tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea).
Read more about this topic: North Lawn (White House)