Home » William Paca House & Garden | Annapolis, Maryland

William Paca House & Garden | Annapolis, Maryland

“View of Paca House and Falling Garden over Chinese Chippendale Bridge”
Credit: Kenneth Tom/Historic Annapolis

Certain gardens enjoy a particularly important place in the collective memory of the Southern Garden History Society, typically relating to repeated visits as well as to people and partnerships associated with those places. Reynolda, the first garden posted on the “Gardens” page, is an example. Similarly, the Annapolis garden of eighteenth-century Maryland governor and Declaration of Independence signer, William Paca, also fits within that special niche, relating to both multiple visits and particular individuals.

A decreasing number of Society members recall their first time at this National Historic Landmark, a central event of the April 1985 annual meeting…only the third such gathering in SGHS history. In a talk by the project’s driving force, Anne St. Clair Wright, many heard for the first time the detailed story of this Revolutionary-era garden’s “Phoenix-from-the-ashes” restoration. SGHS members gathered in the Paca Garden for a second time during the May 2007 annual meeting, a function lead by long-time Society secretary and then Historic Annapolis director of horticulture, Mollie Ridout, an Annapolis native with deep roots there. Once more, they had lunch on the Paca House terrace and walked about a garden that was formerly the site of a hotel, bus station, and parking lot, and which during the 1960s was destined for large-scale new development.

The story of this garden fascinates in ways matched by few designed landscapes. While William Paca’s Palladian home had survived under modern overlay, its garden had long ago disappeared beneath twentieth-century construction, most particularly the Carvel Hall Hotel. (Sources cited below detail how plans for hotel demolition followed by new construction were averted and fresh directions taken by the State of Maryland and Historic Annapolis.) Here credit is universally given to St. Clair Wright and her restoration committee for raising the needed $250,000 purchase money and moving forward to recreate today’s garden.

Along with crediting strong leadership, this is also an account of how extended archaeological study can lead a project from educated guesswork (aided by Charles Wilson Peale’s portrait of Paca revealing garden features) to one of the more exacting of American garden rebirths. Beginning with investigations led by archaeologists Bruce Powell and Glenn Little, such study continued over coming decades. Powell and Little’s work, moreover, laid what can truly be termed the “ground work” for a Laurance Brigham and Orin Bullock design team to take the next step and undertake a restoration project set to exacting standards.

The result exemplifies a Chesapeake-region “falls” or “falling” garden, with terrain allowing stronger terrace elevation changes than the previously discussed Stratford Hall East Garden. The two-acre site slopes down to a spring-fed pond crossed by a Chinese Chippendale bridge and rises again to a small wilderness garden and a tall summer house (both bridge and summer house being seen in the Peale painting). Geometrically ordered, though not aligned with the main block of the house, the garden features a series of parterres enclosed by tall clipped hedges, the size of the terraces having been revealed from remains of the garden walls. Plants found here replicate those known to have been grown during Paca’s time, and as with other recreated Colonial-period gardens, include an array of vegetables and herbs for the kitchen, plus a variety of fruits for the table. As well, various native plants complement the collection, broadening the horticultural experience. 

As with other early southern “Gardens” page sites, the visitor owes a moment of remembrance to the enslaved workers who doubtlessly constructed, planted, and maintained the original Paca garden. Moreover, as with Stratford Hall, among other sites, one must ask again would the Paca project have ever succeeded in such an amazing fashion had not determined women stepped in to bring it all to fruition? 

For further details, visit: https://www.annapolis.org/contact/william-paca-house/

For more on Paca Garden archaeology, see: https://anth.umd.edu/research/william-paca-garden

For Paca Garden plants, visit: https://www.carlisleschesapeake.com/plants-of-the-18th-century-in-the-william-paca-garden-annapolis-maryland/ 

For a discussion of Annapolis gardens, see https://southerngardenhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Magnolia_Spring_2007.pdf#page=1

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