Anna Merven Carrère (1887-1969)

She was born on Staten Island, New York, and grew up between there, Manhattan and Harrison in Westchester County as the eldest daughter of the renowned architect John Merven Carrère, of Carrère & Hastings. She was educated at the Brearley School in Manhattan (where she became a lifelong friend of Beatrix Farrand) and Bryn Mawr College (1908), graduating in History and Economics. She began her career as assistant editor of a weekly review published by the U.S. State Department on European politics and economics. Between 1915 and 1919 she worked with Military Intelligence in the War Department before enrolling at the Cambridge School of Architecture & Landscape for Women at Harvard. Leaving in 1921, she went to Peking in China as a researcher with the American Legation until 1924 when she returned to Cambridge and graduated in 1925.

Her interest in landscaping had started early and she designed the boxwood hedges (for which she would become famous) at "Box Hedge" her childhood home at 288 Richmond Terrace on Staten Island. In 1908, after her father bought "Red Oaks" in Westchester, she designed its formal gardens. On going into landscaping professionally from 1925 she partnered with Rose Greeley and made her home at 2906 N Street, Georgetown, Washington, D.C. Greeley and Carrere enjoyed a professional partnership that lasted for for several decades, principally in Washington D.C. and Harford County, Maryland. Their work was frequently featured in House & Garden magazine and they were complemented their “singly successful” method for designing “precise patterns in small (city) gardens”.

Anna retired in 1936 and bought an old stone farmhouse from William F. Bayless on Harmony Church Road near Darlington in Maryland that she named “Ann’s Acres”. She redesigned the garden, laying out a series of stone walls and terraces and kept her oar in her professionally by helping out local friends with their garden designs. She sold the house in 1946 to the wealthy Boniface family and returned to Georgetown where she collaborated with her friend the architect Gertrude Sawyer who built her new home at 3212 Reservoir Road while she transformed the garden into a Japanese flower garden. All her homes were notable for her collection of oriental furniture she had continued to accumulate over 40-years on her regular visits to her friend Lucy Calhoun in Peking.