Locating the Georgic: from the <italic>ferme ornée</italic> to the model farm: Fid-Bau Portal

Locating the Georgic: from the ferme ornée to the model farm

Sayre, Laura B.

The ferme ornée, or ornamented farm, has traditionally been viewed as a minor episode in eighteenth-century garden history, a novel but somehow unsustainable experiment pursued by a handful of more or less eccentric landowners.¹ Formal definitions, while not easy to come by, usually point to the ferme ornée's oxymoronic nature, a perceived or assumed tension between the economic imperatives of ‘authentic’ farm operations, on the one hand, and any idea of frivolous ornamentation, on the other. Thus, Wyatt Papworth, in the 1850s, described the ferme ornée as ‘the ornamental property of an amateur farmer’; John Barrell, in 1972, called it the ‘practical man's version of the landscape garden’; in 1993, Douglas Chambers suggested ‘the small-holding of a man of philosophical mind’; while a more recent glossary offered a ‘garden into which a genuine farm was incorporated’.² The ferme ornée has not been extensively studied, however, and beyond such definitions even its basic features are not well understood. William Brogden, for example, proposed that the ferme ornée must be ‘small’ (between 200 and 600 acres) and feature ‘a literal mixing of the pleasurable and profitable parts of a country life’, but without necessarily conforming to any particular style or lay-out — in other words, it could be found in both regular and naturalistic gardens — whereas Chambers argued that the ferme ornée was characterized by its distinctive use of trees and shrubs, and must above all exhibit a high level of botanical sophistication, what he called ‘the georgic treaty between horticulture and agriculture’.³