Abstract American historians are familiar with the grand gardens of Chesapeake gentry such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson but know few details about the smaller gardens of artisans and craftsmen whose numbers grew in colonial towns during the second half of the eighteenth century. Marylander William Faris (1728–1804) was a craftsman and innkeeper who laid out his Annapolis garden in the 1760s. This clockmaker and silversmith kept an intimate 704 page diary (1712–1804) of day-to-day happenings plus his gardening efforts during the last thirteen years of his life. This unique journal offers a rare opportunity to reconstruct the town garden of an early American artisan. When Faris settled in Annapolis at mid-century, the capital was at the height of its political, economic, and social dominance in Maryland.1