Lessons from That 1834 Landscape Gardening Guidebook

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!)

> 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.

Sounds like a great book by a real shrubber :)

https://youtu.be/5YWbO0IR-2U

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

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 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...