President paves over the Rose Garden lawn; cites women's heels.

The Rose Garden of the White House, a space planted by Ellen Wilson in 1913 and redesigned by Bunny Mellon at the request of John F. Kennedy in 1962, is no longer a garden in the conventional sense. The grass was removed this summer. The replacement is paving stone, laid on the diagonal, ringed with new drainage grates patterned with stars and stripes. The flowers remain in their beds. The lawn does not.

The match to the patio at Mar-a-Lago is, by NPR’s reporting, exact. Same paving pattern. Same yellow-and-white striped umbrellas. Same speaker system, capable of being controlled from an iPad. The press corps was given a tour on Tuesday. The photographs ran over the weekend.

The President, asked to explain the renovation, said: “The grass was wet. Their heels are going through the grass, like, four inches deep.”

This is, on its face, a defensible piece of justification. Wet grass is wet. Heels sink. There is no public-policy crime in laying patio stone in a famously rainy city. The cost, $1.9 million, was covered by private donations to the Trust for the National Mall. No taxpayer was, narrowly, charged.

The structural matter is what is not in the explanation. The Rose Garden is not a personal patio. It is the space where presidents of both parties have signed legislation, addressed the nation, hosted state visits, and, in moments of national mourning, spoken to the public. Bunny Mellon’s design was, in its time, a national project. It was not commissioned to host a casino-club aesthetic.

A serious country does not redecorate the Rose Garden in the image of a private resort because the resort has comfortable umbrellas. A serious country leaves the lawn where the lawn was, because the lawn is the lawn.

Calmly documenting the decline.