Fascinating garden puzzles

By Hosea Omole

Labyrinth or a maze designed to suit your garden adds fun and unique beauty to your home. Dating back as far as 3,000 years, they have transformed from places of rituals and sacred dances to ones of walking, meditation and exercise.

Unlike the labyrinth with one way in and one way out, a maze is a puzzle. It presents alternative paths that mislead the walker into dead ends. The walker must find the right way to the destination, often having to turn back and start all over again. The experience can be quite challenging and is usually undertaken in the spirit of fun.

Hedge

But both are worthy additions to your formal garden. Nothing depicts a formal French garden better than labyrinths and mazes.

Here are some tips to help you create an outstanding one on your backyard for fun and beauty.

Traditional mazes and labyrinths were grand. They were made of a series of well-manicured hedges twisting and winding, sometimes for kilometres. Some were full-height, raising above the human scale such that the walker had no way of telling what lay around the next corner.

More recently, however, perhaps because of reducing garden space and time and money for maintenance, hedge mazes and labyrinths have become a lot smaller. Maintained at waist height and compacted to fit, they are definitely more manageable to set up and maintain.

But today’s mazes and labyrinths are by no means any less exciting. They are more intelligent and beautiful than ever. Their form has become a lot more important than their function. They incorporate a wider variety of plants, colour and garden decor; the main objective being to recreate history in the present.

The centre of a maze, which is usually the destination, often doubles up as a great place to take a break after the struggle to get there. It’s the perfect place to add some comfortable seating as well as a highly valued statue or water feature.

Ornamental

As mazes and labyrinths become more ornamental, gardeners have become more creative in the way they express them in the garden. Today, it is perfectly in order to build one from pebbles, stones or pavers.

Mazes and labyrinths have also found their ways onto places not traditionally associated with them — walls. Wall mazes can be trained on large, monotonous walls to break them up and provide an interesting puzzle to keep viewers busy as they look at it.

Lawn mazes comprise a pattern of pavement or other hard surfaces on the lawn. The path traced by the surface takes users through a maze or labyrinth as they try to find the exit. The kids will particularly love it.