[HN Gopher] Lessons from That 1834 Landscape Gardening Guidebook
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Lessons from That 1834 Landscape Gardening Guidebook
Author : fi-le
Score : 107 points
Date : 2025-06-07 21:48 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (fi-le.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (fi-le.net)
| mock-possum wrote:
| 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!)
| vintermann wrote:
| I'm not sure I learned any lessons for UI design, but I'm pretty
| sure I learned a lesson relevant for Minecraft.
| akie wrote:
| > In German and Dutch, the now popular combination of chocolate,
| vanilla and strawberry ice cream is called Puckler Ice Cream.
|
| As a Dutch person living in Germany, I've *NEVER* come across
| that name before.
| johnhamlin wrote:
| We call it Neapolitan in America
| Telemakhos wrote:
| In Naples the major flavor combo is chocolate, cherry, and
| pistachio.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| That sounds amazing
| bradly wrote:
| That combo called spumoni in the United States.
| monkeynotes wrote:
| Other Germans certainly have:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/7ui20m/daten_sind_sch%C...
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| I think this is mostly Eastern Germany related. Everyone knows
| it here.
| qrios wrote:
| I remember "Halbgefrorenes"[1] as one of the main source of
| income for many restaurants and Cafes in the former DDR(GDR).
| Second recipe to generate nearly unlimited profit was
| Soljanka[2].
|
| [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halbgefrorenes (german)
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyanka (english)
|
| Edit: format
| kleiba wrote:
| It even has a German wikipedia page:
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BCrst-P%C3%BCckler-Eis
| ralfd wrote:
| Ah come on, you never saw this?
|
| https://www.moevenpick-eis.de/media/u1elcdc3/moevenpick_fuer...
|
| https://img.rewe-static.de/7845627/36211704_digital-image.pn...
|
| Next time in supermarket buy some ice cream.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Sounds like a great book by a real shrubber :)
|
| https://youtu.be/5YWbO0IR-2U
| motohagiography wrote:
| 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...
| runxel wrote:
| Puckler 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
| Puckler it would not have come to be.
|
| Oh and did I mention he is buried in a pyramid?
| y-curious wrote:
| What's a good source to learn about his life (besides
| Wikipedia)?
| runxel wrote:
| 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 :)
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I was wondering why the article was so long and then I got to the
| bottom: "Keep reading with a 7-day free trial"
| qoez wrote:
| 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.)
| quercusa wrote:
| Landscape gardening (as well as thermodynamics) plays an
| important part in Tom Stoppard's play _Arcadia_ , which is
| excellent.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Makes me think of The Greatest Estate Developer Manga/Anime,
| almost as if the protagonist was somewhat inspired by Prince
| Muskau.
|
| https://www.webtoons.com/en/fantasy/the-greatest-estate-deve...
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