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. 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.” 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. 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.” 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.” As Whately wrote, the ferme ornée permitted the integration of pleasure and profit in gardening. 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.” 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.” 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

Texts

Usage

• Heely, Joseph, 1777, describing Leasowes, property of William Shenstone, Shropshire, England ([1777] 1982: 2:228–30)

“The Leasowes is to be considered as a farm only, without the least violation of character. . ..

“But the powers of the designer’s taste, were too great to lead him into error, particularly in capital points. . . . This, without mentioning any thing more is too great of itself not to declare the excellency of his taste—and in a word, the reputation of the Leasowes for being the most compleat Ferme Ornee that ever was formed, so long as it appears in that character, will never die.”

• Jefferson, Thomas, 7 April 1786, describing Leasowes, property of William Shenstone, Shropshire, England (1944: 113)

“Leasowes, in Shropshire.— . . . This is not even an ornamented farm—it is only a grazing farm with a path round it, here and there a seat of board, rarely anything better. Architecture has contributed nothing. The obelisk is of brick. Shenstone had but three hundred pounds a year, and ruined himself by what he did to this farm. It is said that he died of the heart-aches which his debts occasioned him. The part next to the road is of red earth, that on the further part grey. The first and second cascades are beautiful. The landscape at number eighteen, and the prospect at thirty-two, are fine. The walk through the wood is umbrageous and pleasing. The whole arch of prospect may be of ninety degrees. Many of the inscriptions are lost.”

• Jefferson, Thomas, 1 February 1808, describing an experimental garden at Monticello, plantation of Thomas Jefferson, Charlottesville, Va. (1944: 360)

“in all the open grounds on both sides of the 3d. & 4th. Roundabouts, lay off lots for the minor articles of husbandry, and for experimental culture, disposing them into a ferme ornée by interspersing occasionally the attributes of a garden.” [Fig. 1]

• Repton, Humphry, 1816, describing a villa estate of the Earl of Coventry, Streatham, England (quoted in Hunt and Willis 1975: 366)

“The house at Streatham, though surrounded by forty acres of grass land, is not a farm, but a Villa in a garden; for I never have admitted the words Ferme Ornè [sic] into my ideas of taste, any more than a butcher’s shop, or a pigsty, adorned with pea-green and gilding.”