There are many idyllic little farmsteads dotting Northeast Michigan.

Some of my favorites are on Poor Farm Road in Alcona County, named for the agricultural home for the homeless that operated there for decades, providing a place for the indigent to be industrious, cultivating their own crops.

One little barnyard has goats, sheep, ducks, geese, chickens, horses, and cows mingling together in close quarters in and around an itty-bitty barn and pond. Farther along Poor Farm Road is Quick Farm, where a row of antique contraptions lined up in the yard is like an open-air museum of farm machinery development.

But Five Trees Farms is the most storybookish of the bunch. Or the most cinematic. It looks like the set for the movie “Babe”. Mainly because of its flock of Hampshire sheep. The fluffies gambol about in a pasture studded with rock outcroppings and dotted with fruit trees, adjacent to a barn where the whole flock runs whenever a human appears with a pail.

“Food time!”

The Five Trees Farmhouse is the platonic ideal of the architectural genre of “farmhouse,” a rambling balloon-frame structure. It is distinguished by a quilt motif panel, 8-by-8-feet square, on the north wall. Another quilt panel graces the barn. (Quilters! Check out the Quilt Trail, a tour of all the other complex 8-by-8 quilt patterns on buildings or standing as billboards around Alcona County).

Inside, though, the farmhouse departs from America, and lands in Italy. It is designed to evoke an Italian villa. Colorful tiles highlight the plaster and line a wading pool in an open-air courtyard. Birdie Seaver designed it that way.

Bertha Moe “Birdie” Seaver, of Chicago, had money and time on her hands after the death of her wealthy husband.

For reasons many of us can understand, Birdie decided Northeast Michigan was the place to be. In 1920, she purchased a rather rundown farmhouse and some acreage just off Poor Farm Road near Harrisville (to be exact, the corner of Clark and McLean roads), and set about creating a little wonderland there.

She went off to find the perfect furnishings for the extreme makeover she imagined, criss-crossing Europe for the purpose. She returned from her trips with many treasures for the farm: terracotta roof tiles, hand-painted wallpaper, 18th century furniture, and a Sicilian donkey cart painted in bright Mediterranean colors, along with a miniature donkey to pull it around the property.

And sheep! While the interior of the old farmhouse morphed into an Italianate villa, the grounds turned into a scene from the English countryside, with cartoonish, fluffy Hampshire sheep looking like cotton balls on a pool table.

Birdie’s Hampshire sheep won awards on the elite livestock circuit, making a name for her farm.

After Birdie passed, her eccentric retreat became a B-and-B, before B-and-Bs were a thing: The Seaver Country House. The hospitality side fizzled, and, now, the farmhouse/villa is a private residence.

But Birdie’s prize flock of Hampshire sheep kept doing their sheep thing, and kept winning prizes. Now, the progeny of Birdie’s English immigrant animals constitute a separate enterprise: Five Trees Farm, registered purveyors of Hampshire sheep and their wool.

The whole unlikely tale calls for a song, to the tune of “Old McDonald Had a Farm”:

Birdie Seaver bought a farm,

O whee O whee O

And on that farm she had some sheep,

O whee…

With a baa baa here, there, everywhere…

Birdie’s weren’t your average sheep,

No whee no whee no

They were the special Hampshire breed,

Yes indeed they were!

With fluffy wool and cute black face, here, there, everywhere…

She brought her flock across the sea,

No way no way no!

Along with a whole menagerie,

No way, seriously?

With a tiny donkey to pull a cart, a colorful cart from Sicily…

Birdie’s sheep won every prize,

Fancy, fancy sheep!

Her eccentric fame was on the rise,

Due to fancy sheep.

With a blue ribbon here, there, everywhere…

The sheep remain while Birdie’s passed,

Rest in rest in peace!

But her Hampshire lineage will last!

Thanks to Birdie Seaver.