Major change thus came to the White House after long intervals. Those presidents after Jefferson who instigated major alterations and improvements were James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Millard Fillmore, Ulysses S. Grant, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. To carry out Jefferson’s podium, Monroe ordered a massive program of land filling. Under Jackson an orangery was established, and both flower and vegetable gardens adorned the grounds. Legend has it that Jackson planted a local Tennessee version of the Magnolia grandiflora on the south side. President Grant appointed his friend General Orville Babcock, with total authority, to turn the grounds into pleasure gardens, which he did, planting trees and building two great fountains, one on the North Grounds, the other on the South Grounds. Both still function night and day.

First Lady Ellen Axson Wilson, in her short time in the White House, created the first rose garden, known as the West Garden, and directed many additional improvements in the grounds. She called in America’s two most famous landscape gardeners of the time, Beatrix Farrand and George Burnap. President Franklin D. Roosevelt commissioned Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to rethink the grounds with security in mind, and it was Olmsted who undertook a massive regrading of the South Lawn, throwing up high berms along the sides, planting them heavily with trees, blocking views of the White House up close, while leaving the view from the end of the grounds back to the house largely stripped of trees, open and intact.

The most recent period of critical change, following these earlier ones, was 1961–63, a major renovation designed and supervised, as a volunteer, by Rachel Lambert Mellon. Sensitive to the past, and the White House gardens as she found them, Mrs. Mellon modernized along the old landscape lines. She shifted the plan to symmetrical correctness and introduced to the White House more varieties of garden plants than it had ever known. Color became a prime element in her designs. Floriculture had about died at the White House with the demolition of the greenhouses and conservatories sixty years before. Under Mrs. Mellon the grounds entered a new age. When she was finished with her work, the White House was literally nestled in flowers.