Lessons from That 1834 Landscape Gardening Guidebook

Summary

Lessons from That 1834 Landscape Gardening Guidebook 7th of June, 2025 Hermann Ludwig Heinrich Count of Pückler-Muskau was born in 1785 to the Earl Pückler and was later granted sovereignty over his land by King Friedrich III. His fame is unbroken today, but not because of his political power, but because his house chef named a dessert after him. In German and Dutch, the now popular combination of chocolate, vanilla and strawberry ice cream is called Pückler Ice Cream. When the count wasn't busy snacking on novelty sweets, he liked to engage in his other favorite activity — landscape gardening. Having traveled through England at length, he developed a taste for this exclusive art and lamented that his compatriot aristocrats in Prussia were content with comparatively poorly designed pleasure grounds. To educate and promote good style, he authored the classic Hints on Landscape Gardening. The work is simply great fun to read today. It covers all aspects of the landscaping process, starting with basics like how to transplant trees and moving all the way to advanced topics, like how to prevent commoners from chopping the trees back down. Perhaps our own estate is too small to host a Bowling Green, a Hunter's Lodge or even a simple Pavilion, but the presented ideas are still useful to toy with. Landscaping a park is the archetypal example of making an environment. Whether we're writing an IDE, designing an open-world RPG, or making a maze for your pet rat, these lessons apply. Parks are a bit awkward. They are space-constrained, but designed to be walked around in for a long time. This leads to the need for winding paths, which are again awkward. "Why do I have to walk around this corner when I could just go straight?" is a natural reaction of anyone traversing an artificially curved path: "Oh right, I'm doing this for leisure." It reminds us of that suspicion that our life is pointless, which is rather rude. The solution to artificial pointlessness is an artificial poin...