President Donald Trump convened an Oval Office meeting with Matt Koch, the lawns research fellow for Scotts Miracle-Gro Company, to discuss replanting grass on the White House's South Lawn — a session Koch described as 'an amazing dialogue, talking grass for half an hour.'
'Going back and forth about grass,' Koch said of the exchange. He entered the meeting calling himself a 'grass nerd' and left convinced Trump qualifies as an honorary one.
The summit is the latest episode in what has become one of the more unusual recurring themes of Trump's second term. According to an Associated Press review, the president has mentioned grass at a minimum of 45 public events or interviews over the past 18 months — an average of at least once every 12 days — surpassing the 26 references he made across his entire first four-year term.
Trump has connected the topic to his business biography directly. 'I know a lot about grass because I own a lot of golf courses,' he said last August while announcing Kennedy Center Honors recipients. 'And, if you don't have good grass, you're not in business very long.' A week later, visiting park police officers in Washington, he went further: 'I know more about grass than any human being, I think, anywhere in the world.'
The subject has surfaced at events ranging from the signing of an executive order on TikTok to the 2025 White House Diwali celebration, a turkey pardon, an address to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, and a directive on quantum technology. In September, hosting Republican lawmakers for dinner, Trump pledged of Washington's green spaces, 'We're gonna re-grass them with the best guys in the country.'
The South Lawn itself has seen significant change. A stone patio replaced the grassy area near the Rose Garden — a decision Trump defended by noting that women in heels were sinking into the old turf. 'The women would be lifting up their shoes, saying, "You've destroyed my shoes,"' he said at a luncheon last fall. When hosting the Los Angeles Dodgers in July, he said women in heels 'would go down like quicksand.'
More recently, a UFC octagon erected for Trump's 80th birthday in June left large sections of the South Lawn as bare dirt. Crews have since broken ground on a helicopter landing pad, removing additional sod. Trump attributed the need for the pad to the new, more powerful Marine One fleet tearing up the previous grass on landing.
The White House declined to comment on the president's turf focus.
CEO Times take: The Scotts Miracle-Gro meeting is, at its core, a straightforward example of a business-minded executive applying operational standards from his private-sector career to a public asset. Trump built his brand on construction, aesthetics and property value — categories in which grass is a measurable input, not a decorative afterthought. Whether the South Lawn renovation reflects the best use of executive bandwidth is a fair question, but the instinct to bring in domain experts and hold a working session on a concrete problem is the same instinct that drives results in any well-run enterprise. The market, after all, rewards owners who sweat the details of their properties.
