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

摘要

The ferme ornee, 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. Formal definitions, while not easy to come by, usually point to the ferme ornee'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 ornee 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 aman of philosophical mind'; while a more recent glossary offered a 'garden into which a genuine farm was incorporated'. The ferme ornee 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 ornee 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 ornee was characterized by its distinctive use of trees and shrubs, and must above all exhibit a high level of botanicalsophistication, what he called 'the georgic treaty between horticulture and agriculture. Analysis of the ferme ornee, however, as we shall see, has been based on a handful of early examples rather than on an assessment of the full range of evidence -- for if critics are in agreement about any aspect of the problem, it is that the form disappeared almost as quickly as it emerged, and was dead in spirit if not in practice by 1750. This is attributed to two apparently antithetical trends: first, the rise of the picturesque, and second, the development of scientific agriculture. In Barrell's words, 'No real reconciliation of course is possible between the interests of the practical farmer and the picturesque writer' (although, as he observes, Arthur Young's agricultural tours 'allow them to coexist, and indeed insist that they do'). Brogden, similarly, takes for granted that the 'agricultural savant' and the gardening 'dilettante' parted company by mid-century, if not before, while Chambers simply frameshis discussion of the ferme ornee from 1650 to 1750, finding early examples in the work of John Evelyn and lamenting that by the end of the eighteenth century, 'georgic had become almost as artificial as pastoral'. The ferme ornee, according to Chambers,'degenerated into a sort of farm museum, a collection of monuments and buildings meant to signify a nostalgia for a rural ideal made increasingly impossible by the enclosures and the gentrification of the rural hierarchy'. Indeed, writers on the picturesque, from Raymond Williams to Timothy Fulford, have in turn argued that the new aesthetic arose in part as a reaction against the new, increasingly rationalized landscapes created by agricultural improvement.