62 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
single continuous hedge, was a laby-
rinth within a much larger labyrinth of
crisscrossing, tree-lined paths—part of
a series of amusements and delights
concealed within each slice of garden.
An ambling prince or courtier might
have happened upon a fountain, a folly,
a sculpture, or even a banquet hall in
which to enjoy music, sweetmeats, and
wine, depending on which garden bower
he chose to enter.
At the time, a hedge maze had been
an essential element of European formal
gardens for centuries. The first evidence
of a labyrinth formed from hedges can
be found in a record of the removal of
one on a royal estate in Paris in 1431. An
anonymous courtly poem written in En-
gland in the late fourteen-hundreds de-
scribes a group of women “disportying”
themselves “in crosse aleys” before en-
joying a carefree “walke aboute the mase.”
In paintings and engravings from the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
hedge mazes are populated mostly by
couples; according to Saward, the maze
historian, the air of privacy created by
their shady twists and turns made them
an ideal location for romantic dalliances.
(As Dillamore and I walked past a cham-
pagne cork nestled at the base of the
hedge, he told me that the maze is a pop-
ular spot for marriage proposals.)
Garden mazes such as the one at
Hampton Court grew out of a much
earlier tradition of labyrinth carvings.
The oldest such inscription that can be
scientifically dated is a squared-off,
single-path labyrinth scratched into the
back of a clay tablet at the Palace of
Nestor, in Pylos; when the palace burned
down, in about 1200 B.C., the tablet,
whose other side recorded a goat-related
transaction, was accidentally baked, and
the labyrinth was preserved. “It’s not
some sort of magical, mystical object at
all,” Saward told me. “It’s just a doodle.”
Still, the spiralling arms of a labyrinth
have—at various times, in parts of the
world as far afield as Tamil Nadu, India;
Knossos, Crete; and Flagstaff, Arizona—
represented the journey of life, the cos-
mos, and the womb, while serving as a
trap for evil spirits, a cage for monsters,
an ancestral abode, a ritual dance floor,
and a path for pilgrims. Untangling
where the design first arose is all but
impossible, Saward explained: because
the symbol’s shape has remained essen-
tially unchanged across time and place,
there’s no real way to date labyrinth
petroglyphs. “Thus, considerable con-
fusion abounds,” he concluded. “The
history of mazes is a maze in itself.”
Today, the Hampton Court maze is
a victim of its own popularity. Its yew
trees, themselves a replacement for the
original hornbeam, are threadbare in
places where eager visitors have brushed
up against them. Dillamore, a tall,
slope-shouldered man sporting a quiz-
zical air and a stylish fedora, seemed
pained by the state of the maze. “We
try,” he said, gesturing to a rust-brown
shrublet at knee height. “It’s very diffi-
cult to get new yews established.”
Occasionally, British newspapers
carry rumors of a threat to uproot the
entire thing. Dillamore assured me that
he has no such plans, even for resto-
ration purposes, but the maze has faced
the chop before. In 1764, the Hampton
Court Palace grounds came under the
management of the celebrated land-
scape designer Lancelot (Capability)
Brown. He was opposed to hedges be-
cause he disliked visible boundaries of
any sort—he relied, instead, on a ha-ha,
or a fence built in a ditch, to create the
illusion of an endless, rolling pastoral
vista. In any case, the maze by then had
become extremely overgrown and hard
to manage. The novelist Samuel Rich-
ardson wrote that “to every Person of
Taste” the Hampton Court Wilderness
and its mazes “must be very far from
affording any Pleasure, since nothing
can be more disagreeable than to be im-
mured between Hedges.”
Throughout Europe, formal gardens
and their mazes were being replaced
with new, less cluttered landscaping.
The tall hedges bordering the long paths
of the Wilderness were removed, and
its tree-lined, folly-filled garden “rooms”
were replaced with open lawn, studded
with drifts of daffodils. Yet, despite
Brown’s antipathy, the Hampton Court
maze survived. No one is quite sure how:
there are no records of its being used or
maintained until considerably later.
It was in the late nineteenth century
that the Hampton Court maze became
famous. New labor laws had given the
working class regular time off, leisure
was becoming a formalized activity, and
the maze—easily accessible by rail from
London—was opened to the public byQueen Victoria. In a classic comic novel
of the era, Jerome K. Jerome’s “Three
Men in a Boat” (1889), one of the char-
acters describes a disastrous visit to the
maze. He enters before lunchtime, in-
tending to “just walk round for ten min-
utes,” and ends up leading an irate group
of people “who had given up all hopes
of ever getting either in or out, or of
ever seeing their home and friends again”
in circles until a groundsman rescues
them, late in the evening.
This isn’t as fanciful as it sounds. Old
postcards of the maze show a warden
atop a ladder, offering assistance to the
panic-stricken and the perplexed. Dil-
lamore told me about a sunny summer
afternoon in the early nineteen-nine-
ties. “I hadn’t been here very long, and
it was very busy,” he said. Suddenly, he
heard a commotion coming from the
Wilderness. “I thought someone had
taken their clothes off or something,”
he said. “But the screaming continued.”
The sprinkler system within the hedges
had malfunctioned and was sending
high-powered jets of water into the air.
“It was an absolute monsoon,” Dilla-
more said. “Everyone was running
around the maze, lost and trying to get
out, and at the same time getting soak-
ing wet.” Even with this additional in-
centive, they could not find the exit.
“We had to pay a few dry-cleaning bills
from that,” he said, smiling.T
he entrance to Longleat Safari and
Adventure Park, on the grounds of
the ancestral home of the Marquess of
Bath, is one of the more depressing
sights that modern England can offer.
On a Tuesday in September, under ce-
ment-gray skies and the occasional spit
of rain, stony-faced families queued for
hot dogs, fries, fudge, and rows of por-
table toilets, recharging in between rides
on a miniature railway, visits to a ply-
wood “medieval” adventure castle, and
the chance to gawk at some bored-look-
ing gorillas. A short distance away lies
the largest hedge maze in Britain: un-
rolled, its winding pathways would
stretch more than three times as far as
those at Hampton Court.
I had enlisted Jim Rossignol, a com-
puter-game designer and critic from
Bath, to tackle the Longleat maze with
me. Enthusiasts see Longleat, planted
in 1975 and opened to the public in 1978