alt.hn

6/7/2025 at 9:48:15 PM

Lessons from That 1834 Landscape Gardening Guidebook

 https://fi-le.net/pueckler/

by fi-le

6/11/2025 at 2:01:26 PM

Pückler is a fascinating person and most of the stories about him sound so unreal, Hollywood would outright reject scripts containing them.

If you ever find yourself to be in Berlin with an extra day to spare you should take the 1.5 hour drive to Cottbus, where his second park – Branitz – is located. Has a lovely museum in the manor house and in the stable a world class restaurant, cooking his meals with a modern twist (he had an extra meal diary, that's how we know exactly what he has eaten with whom throughout his entire life).

Basically the complete field of modern landscaping design has grown – no pun intended – on his work and vision. The probably best known example is the Central Park in New York. Without Pückler it would not have come to be.

Oh and did I mention he is buried in a pyramid?

by runxel

6/12/2025 at 1:47:00 AM

> Basically the complete field of modern landscaping design has grown – no pun intended – on his work and vision

Capability Brown had a hand also, i believe. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Brown

by woleium

6/11/2025 at 5:28:23 PM

What's a good source to learn about his life (besides Wikipedia)?

by y-curious

6/11/2025 at 8:58:10 PM

Sadly he nowadays seems to be a bit forgotten, apart from the Napolitan ice cream here in Germany named after him (chocolate + strawberry + vanilla), and I am not aware of any books on him in English.

He wrote many books, by which sale he got revenue to foster his expensive landscaping. The "most famous" is probably "Tutti Frutti", which is not about landscaping but a ironic representation of his current times – but this as well has not seen any reprint for probably a century now. I always wondered, why... Maybe I'll do a reprint someday :)

by runxel

6/11/2025 at 12:25:02 PM

I'm not sure I learned any lessons for UI design, but I'm pretty sure I learned a lesson relevant for Minecraft.

by vintermann

6/11/2025 at 2:13:21 PM

Free game idea The Witness style game using this as inspiration for the map design. (The witness is already kinda like this but we need more like it, more games that's plesant just to walk around in even if there wasn't a game element.)

by qoez

6/11/2025 at 2:44:46 PM

Landscape gardening (as well as thermodynamics) plays an important part in Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia, which is excellent.

by quercusa

6/11/2025 at 2:02:20 PM

I was wondering why the article was so long and then I got to the bottom: "Keep reading with a 7-day free trial"

by jccalhoun

6/14/2025 at 5:30:48 PM

I think you somehow opened the wrong link...this isnt hosted on one of those sites.

by Xss3

6/12/2025 at 6:42:39 AM

I wrote it and am really confused what you mean, I think I'm missing a joke? If not this is serious, it shouldn't be there.

by fi-le

6/13/2025 at 6:30:11 PM

Perfectly fine for me.

by thomasanders0n

6/11/2025 at 12:19:53 PM

Onto the reading list it goes! Love stuff like this that gets into basic principles of designing human experiences, through a very specific lens (in this case, garden landscaping!)

by mock-possum

6/12/2025 at 6:45:35 AM

That is the sweetest compliment I could have hoped for, thank you.

by fi-le

6/11/2025 at 12:37:57 PM

> In German and Dutch, the now popular combination of chocolate, vanilla and strawberry ice cream is called Pückler Ice Cream.

As a Dutch person living in Germany, I've *NEVER* come across that name before.

by akie

6/11/2025 at 1:19:28 PM

I think this is mostly Eastern Germany related. Everyone knows it here.

by Helmut10001

6/11/2025 at 12:48:15 PM

We call it Neapolitan in America

by johnhamlin

6/11/2025 at 1:24:33 PM

In Naples the major flavor combo is chocolate, cherry, and pistachio.

by Telemakhos

6/11/2025 at 3:42:46 PM

That sounds amazing

by FuriouslyAdrift

6/11/2025 at 7:45:07 PM

That combo called spumoni in the United States.

by bradly

6/11/2025 at 1:46:33 PM

reminds me of christopher alexander, but for landscapes. they emphasize function and adaptation to what's there instead of making features that represent ideas from other places and don't belong. this came up in popular architecture discussions years ago about "ducks vs. decorated sheds"[1] where littering the landscape with symbols is what people sense as uncanny and vulgar. mcmansions are ugly because they are what poorer people think rich people like and the result ends up recieved and insincere.

the principle appears to apply to landscaping going back centuries as well. I codify it today as "the difference between effect and affect" where in the arts I pursue you start by immitating, or affecting what you think is good, but there isn't a path to being great there, as the things we think are good were the downstream effect of mastering fundamentals and the expression of a mature artist. it's the consequence of "fake it until you make it," where eventually you run out of things to immitate and are still uncanny and phony, because it isn't a sincere or original expression of the concrete environment and present conversation. Adding a grotto to a park because grottos represent rich people taste is going to be disgusting, but a walking around a copse of trees is charming because it's the effect of the landscape and a sense of place.

the <blink> HTML tag is probably the best example of this mistake, where someone thought, "computers have blinking lights, computer people must care about blinking: if we let them make everything blink we will be rich!" I suspect that logic extends to most failed startups, where people have invented the "blink-tag for X" based on this same reflected misinterpretation of what they think people want, and imitate it without actual engagement that would produce the effect of making something they in fact want.

It's funny that people have been making this same error with tree placement in parks for centuries though.

[1]https://99percentinvisible.org/article/lessons-sin-city-arch...

by motohagiography