La ferme ornée…

The term ferme ornée or 'ornamented farm' describes a country estate laid out partly according to aesthetic principles and partly for farming, following the classical view of the twin aims of poetry, inherited from Horace "to instruct and to delight". Palladio opened the way in the 16^th century designing his villas both for the pleasure of country living and the practicalities of its rural activities.

La Placette Haute could not possibly look more different than this ideal when Dan and I first saw it almost exactly a year ago. The woodland was edged with brambles, walls were covered with ivy and all sort of invasive species were taking over what used to be open spaces.

It was hard to give our imagination any defined course. We had lots of land, more than we could handle. We wanted a garden. The examples we had fresh in our minds would hardly fit: a rich palette of colors as in Giverny? Rigor, symmetry and perspective as at Vaux-le-Vicomte? A romantic layout as in George Sand’s Nohant? The green geometry of Italian gardens as in villa Torrigiani?

We came rapidly to an agreement: we didn’t want too many colors yet we could not see an overpowering green-on-green pattern either. Which led the way to a balanced combination of white, off white, cream, lavender, and blue.

  

Lots of things were in our way though. Not just brambles. Rows and rows of pine trees obstructed the southern exposure that we knew was open and delightfully pastoral. Thick screens of wild prune trees also formed an unsightly barrier. We had to be radical. Luckily a lumber company offered to clear our pinewoods. But this left a terrain scarred with rows of stumps and covered with piles of cut branches. We had to be even more radical. A project of terrassement is what we needed, if we could bite the bullet of its high costs.

This past Monday Sylvain Chartroule & Cie, reputedly the best in the area, came with huge machinery. A shovel started extracting the stumps while amassing the branches in an enormous pile that burned non-stop for three days, whose ashes had to be then buried in a hole. On the fourth day the land was smoothed down and ready for seeding in spring.

Meanwhile, other sizeable pieces of equipment were working around the houses. Within a couple of days our courtyard was excavated around a delicately designed central lawn à la française, filled with compact stones and covered with small cream-colored gravel. No more time was needed to turn a nightmare of several months into the beginning of something that had only been nurtured in our mind's eye. The stone well surmounted by its nice ironwork is now looming above the neat line of the southern terrace; the two hazelnut trees will shade our summer lunches while we sit comfortably on a leveled graveled ground. The vines will soon grow to reach their simple iron pergola. And the espaliered pear trees have just been planted along the wall of the house opposite, making an exquisitely rustic counterpoint to the formality of the central lawn.