The Landscape of Wooburn and its Heritage

The term “Ferme Ornée,” meaning an ornamental farm, is coined by a garden theorist Stephen Switzer, who defines the key aspect of this style of garden design, drawing on Horace, as utile dulti, or mingling of pleasure with productivity. Itʼs a space of bucolic ideal influenced by a reinterpretation of the classéical world of Georgics by another Roman poet Virgil. The first and a prototypal “Ferme Ornée” is Wooburn Farm in Surrey which was laid out by Philip Southcote in 1734-35, and then not a few “Ferme Ornée” had appeared from the mid-18th Century. But the agricultural revolution and the French Revolution uncovered their fictionality, and they gradually declined and began to be replaced by Model Farms. Although in the 1790s Wooburn was transferred to a practical scientific farm, it has established no small influence on modern gardens and farms. This paper discusses first the details of Southcoteʼs Wooburn, and then, focusing on the relation between pleasure and productivity, examines the heritage of this “Ferme Ornée” to later periods.