An Annapolis silversmith and gardener.(Books about Antiques)

William Faris, born in London in 1728, was a prosperous silversmith, clock-and watchmaker, and tavern keeper in Annapolis, Maryland, from 1756 or 1757 until his death in 1804. He was also a single-minded gardener, and it is in that in carnation that he wrote a daily diary from 1792 until a few days before he died. The diary has now been published by the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore with extensive notes identifying people and events.

Like Goethe, Faris records the weather every day and chronicles births, deaths, marriages, and illnesses in his family and in the town. But chiefly he fulfills a statistician's dream with his minute record of Brussels sprouts, cabbages, and tulips planted, harvested, and planted again.

Faris and his wife, Priscilla, had nine children, of who Faris appears to have preferred the girls to the boys, since some of the boys periodically left home in a huff. The diarist does mention these instances, though not at length, for the entries on most subjects except the garden are brief to the point of terseness. George Washington's death and the election of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency are each dismissed in one line, and Faris's own birthday (and no one else's) also merits a line a year. He is more self-indulgent about his agues, fevers, constipation, and other ills, and goes into detail about the remedies for same--among them, paregoric, laudanum, chamomile, and an otherwise unidentified bark tea.

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One of the more eloquent entries reveals Faris as a rather feisty fellow, so perhaps his sons had reason to absent themselves from time to time. On March 20, 1792, he was planting parsnips and working on asparagus beds when two girls climbed up on his fence. He told them to get down, but "the Biggest reply'd shee would not she would sett thare as long as she pleas, I told her she should get down. she replyd she would not get down for me. I told her she was an impudant slut [and] ... as I lifte my hand to put her hand off the fence she said you Impedant scoundrel tuch me if you Dare. I pushd her hand off the fence, she stept down and call'd me and Old Dog Old Dog. I told her she was a strumpit ... and I told she was an Impudant Bitch ... and she and the girl call me several approbious names."

A careful reading of the diary implies a man of eclectic interests who was handy with his hands. When he died in 1804 one ...