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Historic Columbia is embarking on an estimated 10-year, multimillion-dollar effort to turn the area bounded by Calhoun, Taylor, Marion and Barnwell streets into a destination garden district.

Under the plan, the 18 blocks that encompass downtown's five historic homes would feature landscapes spanning 100 years of gardening, from 1820 to 1920. The project would include interpretive signs, streetscaping and pedestrian walks intended to attract tourists and locals alike.

Also, the new district would be a walkable link between adjacent but disparate neighborhoods: Main Street to the west, Bull Street to the north, USC to the south and Allen and Benedict colleges to the east.

"What we want to do is create a destination area where people can move comfortably from site to site and from neighborhood to neighborhood," said Robin Waites, executive director of Historic Columbia, which manages the homes.

The effort is significant because city officials, developers and marketers are beginning to "connect the dots" of downtown's ongoing building boom.

"Connecting the city through green spaces, gardens and parks is very important," Mayor Bob Coble said. "This could be an excellent connection between areas of the city that have historically been divided. It's a tremendous step forward and deserves the city's support. It's perfect."

In the Capital City's sprawling downtown, areas like Five Points, Olympia, the Vista and Main Street are all moving forward -- but often separately -- with beautification efforts and retail and residential development. Most have separate master plans, advocacy groups, marketing plans and funding streams.

"Something that this community needs is for people to find their way from one attraction district to another," said Dave Zunker, vice president for development of the Columbia Metropolitan Convention & Tourism Bureau. "All of the places that are reasons to come to Columbia ... need to be pulled together."

A Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce committee is looking into ways to blend all those efforts, in addition to planning other aspects of downtown's growth, such as housing development. The intent is to provide a more focused vision of the future -- something many people say City Council and city government lack.

But the committee's co-chairman, financier Don Tomlin, said the Economic Development Ombudsman Group is still in "research mode."

So Historic Columbia's garden district, like the Three Rivers Greenway and USC's Innovista research district, could be a pioneer in linking areas in this historically divided city.

The garden district and its historic homes -- which include many private antebellum structures that survived the Civil War burning of Columbia -- have been a tourist draw for nearly two centuries.

The Hampton-Preston Mansion was built in 1818 and was once home to one of the South's most impressive gardens.

Visitors marveled at the four-acre grounds, which featured Cherokee rose and boxwood borders, trained cedars, Japanese ginkos and 80-foot tall trees draped with English ivy. There were greenhouses and flowers, grapevines and fountains.

The Civil War changed all that.

In the decades following, the garden fell into disrepair. By the end of World War II, it was overgrown and underappreciated to the point that it was bulldozed to make way for retail development that never happened, Waites said.

Under the garden district plan, the Hampton-Preston house and the four other historic homes would tell the story of a century of gardening in the South:

--The Robert Mills House -- built in the 1820s and representative of the Federal period

--The Hampton-Preston Mansion -- 1840-60, antebellum

--The Woodrow Wilson Family Home -- 1870s, Victorian

--The Mann-Simons Cottage -- 1890 to 1920s, African-American traditional working landscape

--Seibels House -- 1920s, Colonial Revival

Waites said Historic Columbia wants to partner with garden clubs and possibly Riverbanks Zoo and Botanical Garden to make the project a reality. It also plans to ask for financial assistance from the historic homes' owners -- the city of Columbia and Richland County -- to augment a private fundraising drive.

She said the organization has no firm cost estimates, "but it will take multimillions of dollars over many years to do it right."

Historic Columbia hired landscape architect and author Jim Cothran, an S.C. native and nationally known expert on historic gardens, to plan the gardens and find ways to connect them to the rest of the district and surrounding neighborhoods.

He said the first step was exhaustive research of the original Hampton-Preston garden and other gardens in the area, such as the Caldwell-Boylston garden at the Governor's Mansion -- one of Columbia's hidden treasures.

Hampton-Preston "had a national reputation and was a well-known garden," said Cothran, of Atlanta's Robert and Co. firm. "It was a period of time when new plants were being introduced from China and Japan. There was a great palate in terms of unusual plants."

Cothran said the new gardens would tap into the nation's growing interest in heritage tourism.

"We could grab some of those people heading for Charleston," he said.