52 
House & Garden 
The. garden at Ken Klare has a rich forest background. It is planted in bays of box and evergreens that 
extend irregularly into the lawn, giving shelter and contrast to the flowers. 'Emile Fardel, garden designer 
A BLUE GARDEN BLOOMING IN JULY 
Km Klare , the Garden of Mrs. Clarence Kenyon , Jr. at Glen Cove , L. /., Is Rich 
In Suggestions for Both Large and Small Places 
l SED to think that July was the gar- 
den’s month off, coming as it does after 
the rush of June bloom and before the 
brilliance of the August phloxes, but there 
never was a greater mistake. And I felt it 
last summer, especially on the day when I was 
visiting Ken Klare at Glen Cove. 
Ken Klare has what you would call a large 
garden with all the oneness and sense of inti¬ 
macy of a small garden and all the freedom 
and sense of breathing space of a large one— 
an ideal combination. It is only two years 
old, but with its great bays of box bushes and 
Mugho pines, with its tall cedars and its sur¬ 
rounding of woodsy trees, it has an age-old 
look. It looks as though it had always been 
there. That s one of the magic things about 
so many of our beautiful gardens in this coun¬ 
try. They don’t look new like the rest of us. 
They have the charm that in European gardens 
you always feel comes from the stored-up mem¬ 
ories of long and beautifully-spent past times. 
I was alone at Ken Klare that day, and it is 
a lovely thing to be all alone in a garden. You 
get into its spirit of peace and quiet and beauty 
as you never quite can if it simply forms a 
ANTOINETTE PERRETT 
background to human intercourse. And at 
Ken Klare, on that warm and brilliant day, 
I was especially impressed by a sense of cool¬ 
ness and refreshment, for against the dark of 
box and pine and cedar there was not a gay 
medley of varied colors. No, it was all a lovely 
cool blue—nothing but blue flowers, tucked 
away in bays, and matted into the lawn, or 
serving as tall borders, or lying low about the 
lily pool—blue, nothing but blue. 
W hen you walk about at Ken Klare you 
realize how man)' different kinds of flowers 
make up its blue scheme—ageratum, heliotrope, 
verbenas, cornflowers, blue sage, annual and 
perennial larkspurs, Veronica, bluebells, for¬ 
get-me-nots. And the way they are planted! 
Sometimes they’re all together, so that you feel 
as though you’d have to plant them all to simu¬ 
late their charm. Then you’ll find a bay of 
larkspur all by itself, and find it quite self- 
sufficient ! It is this quality in the garden that 
makes it so valuable to write about, that makes 
it so rich in suggestions for everyone, for large 
gardens and for small gardens, for just a bit 
of a border here or there, for just a bit of bloom 
in some odd but much-loved little corner. Take 
the annual larkspurs, for instance, and it’s 
well-nigh incredible what a tall host of fairy 
spikes a single packet of seeds will bring forth 
—and then often they will seed themselves for 
a second year. Last spring, for instance, I 
planted some larkspur seed out of doors that 
didn’t do very well on account of the rain and 
the late season, but larkspurs that had seeded 
themselves the year before made up the luxuri¬ 
ous bloom of my garden for me. I decided to 
plant my new larkspur seed always in fall 
after that, but when I spoke to the gardener 
at Ken Klare about it, he told me that some¬ 
times they come up when planted in the fall 
and sometimes they don’t. 
“If it’s a toss-up,” said I, “I think I’ll plant 
half in fall and half in spring so as to make 
sure of some of them.” 
I was starting to give a list of the blue flow¬ 
ers at Ken Klare, and, of course, I hardly got 
started. Supposing I tried again. Imagine, 
for instance, starting the list with verbenas and 
going right on, when verbenas are so rich in 
their suggestion of how varied and subtle the 
colors of a blue garden may be—verbenas that 
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