The French Garden and the English Garden
Will Manidis · 2026
"New systems are usually built like French formal gardens — a geometry imposed from above that flattens whatever was already there — when they could instead be built like English landscape gardens, which study the existing terrain and work with what's already load-bearing."
Versailles was designed on paper before anyone visited the site — its geometry imposed on the land, the land's own contours flattened to fit. The English landscape tradition did the opposite: walk the ground first, then ask what it's already trying to become.
Manidis traces this through Le Nôtre's Versailles (rivers diverted, hills leveled, hundreds of gardeners deployed forever after just to hold the geometry in place against nature) versus Capability Brown's English estates (months spent walking the land, working with existing streams and tree stands, pronouncing that a place had 'great capabilities'). He argues most new technology is built the French way: it surveys an existing system — healthcare, financial markets, an old industry's workflows — and flattens it, importing its own 'topsoil' rather than incorporating what already worked. The maintenance cost then shows up later, paid by users rather than the system's designers, the way Versailles's upkeep was paid by taxed French subjects who never set foot in the garden.
In Will Manidis's garden metaphor, what is the central difference between the French (Versailles) and English (Capability Brown) approaches to building a new system?
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The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- On the Garden (against Citrini)X (Twitter) Article
Goodhart's Law
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."