THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021 67
cuts to get to your goal—the kind of
flexibility of thinking you need to nav-
igate a maze.” My repeated returns to
the mouth of the Escot maze illustrated
the point: the puzzle would not change,
which meant that my approach had to.
“
W
ell, that was up to the usual
high standard,” Fisher said as
we exited the Escot maze. While I said
hello to Escot’s newly rescued orphan
bear cubs, housed in a temporary en-
closure just behind the maze, Fisher re-
turned to the parking lot to fetch a drone
that he would use to shoot aerial foot-
age of the maze, in order that I might
describe his masterpiece as it looked
from above. Within his mazes, Fisher
is used to pulling the strings to manip-
ulate a captive audience, and it frequently
seemed as though he had trouble switch-
ing off his inner puppet master in his
dealings with the rest of the world.
As I watched tiny humans filmed by
the drone make exactly the same mis-
takes that I had, I recalled that a Ger-
man word for maze, der Irrgarten, trans-
lates as “error garden,” and that, during
the first golden age of hedge mazes, they
were often positioned beneath terraces
or high windows, so that spectators could
savor the confusion of others. Mean-
while, Fisher, who favors a Socratic style
of conversation, directed my attention
to a series of locked gates near the en-
trance. “What might they be for, I won-
der?” he said. When I declined to guess,
he provided the answer: “They’re for
the groundskeepers, so they can get the
clippings out without walking for miles.”
With similar pride, he pointed out the
roof over the maze’s central tower. At
half the size of the square platform it
covered, it left four triangular corners
exposed to the elements—and used fifty
per cent less lumber. “This is one of my
hallmarks,” he said, perhaps even more
delighted by the maze’s practical and
cost-saving measures than by its inge-
niously disorienting layout.
Fisher is in many respects interested
in his projects only while they are still
unrealized designs—Escot’s owners
were left to plant all its beech trees.
Nonetheless, solving the challenges
faced by maze managers, like hedge
maintenance, customer throughput, and
budget balancing, is at least as fascinat-
ing to Fisher as creating puzzles for
public enjoyment. Not that he gets it
right every time. As he gleefully ignored
his G.P.S. on the way home, squeezing
into the inside lane to sail past traffic,
he told me that his most recent maze,
in Ningbo, despite being the world’s
largest, was not tough enough. “I was
The maze at Hampton Court Palace, dating from around 1690, is the oldest hedge maze still in existence.
