Ferme ornée/Ornamental farm

History

The term ornamental farm appeared in English for the first time in Stephen Switzer’s Practical Husbandman (1733), a dissertation about ancient and modern villas, and in French (ferme ornée) in Switzer’s 1742 edition of Ichnographia Rustica.1 The ornamental farm, or ferme ornée, integrated the pleasure garden, farm lands, and kitchen garden. Although this garden type persisted into the mid-nineteenth century in America, evidence for the use of these specific terms is scarce. These terms are used far more frequently by twentieth-century garden historians than they were by Americans in the colonial and early national period. The few citations collected for this study come primarily from Thomas Jefferson and A. J. Downing, perhaps the two most prominent figures in early American garden history.

On his visit to England in 1786, Jefferson and his colleague John Adams visited some celebrated ornamented farms, following Thomas Whateley’s recommendation in Observations on Modern Gardening (1770). Jefferson wrote that the gardens and fields of the ferme ornée at Woburn Farm in Surrey were “all . . . intermixed, the pleasure garden being merely a highly ornamented walk through & round the divisions of the farm & kitchen.”2 Eight years later Jefferson instructed his overseer at Monticello to lay out the lots “disposing them into a ferme ornée by interspersing occasionally the attributes of a garden.”

Although rarely designated as such, many southern gardens in the eighteenth century exemplified the ferme ornée as defined by Switzer. A visitor to Westover, on the James River in Virginia, reported that William Byrd II was “engaged in planting a colony of Switzer’s upon the Roanoke,” referring to the ornamental farm ideal with which Switzer is credited.3 These extensive landholdings often comprised fields, kitchen gardens, orchards, and a pasture next to parterres and walks bordered by shrubbery. In the South, the American additions to this garden type were slave quarters, which were often positioned prominently on the site.

Such a display was in keeping with Joseph Addison’s advice to “make a pretty Landskip of one own Possessions.”4 Descriptions of these plantations, without using the specific phrase “ferme ornée,” or “ornamented farm,” often paraphrased Switzer or Whately. For example, a 1785 description of Crowfield, William Middleton’s plantation near Charleston, reads that it was a “most desirable abode, where profit and pleasure may be as well combined.”5 As Whately wrote, the ferme ornée permitted the integration of pleasure and profit in gardening.6 This sense of the combination of farm and garden was clear in Mary M. Ambler’s 1770 account of the celebrated Mount Clare in Baltimore, where the “whole Plantn seems to be laid out like a garden.”7 In America, the preferred terms were plantation or farm (see Plantation). Belfield, Charles Willson Peale’s estate in Germantown, Pa., was a kind of ferme ornée in its integration of highly decorated buildings and gardens and fields. The toolshed, for example, was built to look like a triumphal arch.

The terms “ferme ornée” and “ornamental farm” were revived in the 1840s by A. J. Downing, who saw in this garden type an application for his aesthetics of rural taste. He emphasized the importance of the “agriculturalist” in America, claiming that the farmer was the ideal citizen. In his Architecture of Country Houses (1850), he wrote, “[I]n this country, where every farmer is a proprietor, where a large portion of the farmers are intelligent men, and where farmers are not prevented by anything in their condition or in the institutions of the country, from being among the wisest, the best, and the most honored of our citizens, the wants of the farming class deserve, and should receive the attention to which their character and importance entitle them.”8 He therefore promoted the ferme ornée as an appropriate expression of this class. In his publications he offered designs for farm buildings such as dairies, barns, dovecotes, stables, and icehouses. He even conceived of a suitable style for the farmhouse of a ferme ornée, which he called the cottage ornée.

-- Therese O'Malley