Baker’s Peonies And Anecdotes At Garden Club

Lost in the woods of western Connecticut, R. (Bob) Kennard Baker has carved out an active existence, an inner peace, and a spectacular garden. Peonies are the focus of three rambling hillside acres of Mr Baker’s home, and the months of May and June are quite colorful.

Mr Baker will be the guest speaker for the next meeting of Garden Club of Newtown. The club will be at C.H. Booth Library, 25 Main Street in Newtown, on Tuesday, January 23. A members’ lunch and business meeting will begin at noon. Mr Baker’s program begins at 1 and the public is invited to attend, free of charge.

A native of North Carolina, raised in Madison, N.J., and an alumnus of Washington and Lee University in Virginia, Mr Baker has juxtaposed his work endeavors to include four years in the US Marine Corps, five years as a Wilhelmina and Ford Agency model, ten years in a family-owned shoe firm, and five years as president of Polo/Ralph Lauren Footwear. At that time, Mr Baker held the international license to design, manufacture and market all shoe products for the designer Ralph Lauren.

In the mid 1980s, Mr Baker began bringing life to an early 18th Century house in Connecticut that was initially intended to be used for weekends only. As house and gardens progressed and gradually seduced him, Mr Baker retired from a worldwide lifestyle that had provided great rewards but had left little time to reflect… to smell the peonies, as it were.

Mr Baker immediately went about enlarging his collection of herbaceous, tree and intersectional peonies, which had begun as a fond memory of his grandfather’s gardens, to include more than 450 varieties. Today the color range includes white, cream, pink, coral, fuchsia, purple, yellow, red, flame, wine and mahogany, plus an infinite selection of shadings and marking.

The collection includes all bloom forms — single, Japanese, semi-double, full double, and bomb — representing its owner’s collecting efforts from China, Japan, France, England and the United States. It has been said that Mr Baker’s is the largest private collection of varietal peonies in the world.

A board director of American Peony Society, Mr Baker enjoys photographing and lecturing about his passion. He is writing a book with the working title Peonies and Anecdotes.

Mr Baker’s home was the December 1996 cover story for Country Living magazine. His peony gardens were featured in the April 1998 issue of Country Living and March 1999 Connecticut magazine; they will be a March 2001 feature story in Martha Stewart Living.

Non-members are always welcome to attend Garden Club of Newtown programs. For additional information contact Ginnie Carey at 270-1108.