How to build a labyrinth
A labyrinth set in the garden offers a chance for a meditational journey and quiet reflection.
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f you’re looking for something new to challenge your horticultural leanings, why not build a labyrinth. Now, either you are saying, “Yes! That’s what we need to be mindful!” or, “Pfft. What’s the next article?” Hear me out, though. A labyrinth is a good way to create a walking space in your garden among your plants, be they flowers or vegetables. And if it happens to be spiritually uplifting to walk through a labyrinth as you check on your plants, so be it. A labyrinth can be made of anything; there are groups who make them out of canvas so they can be moved 18 • 2021
around and installed temporarily in a place. Others use stones to demarcate paths or simply mow the areas, leaving the rest to grow. But we are concerned with making one using plants as the lines separating the pathways. Think about the garden shapes. In your imaginings, start with a plot of, say, 30 feet by 30 feet. If you planted the full 30 feet, you couldn’t easily get to all the plants, either to see them or to tend to them. You’d need walkways. You could make the walkways in parallel rows. You could make a kind of checkerboard, as Marjorie Harris, the editor at the now defunct Gardening Life quite famously did. You Issue 4
could make a spiral. A labyrinth is just another design choice, possibly the most elegant. You could make the labyrinth your herb garden, keeping things mostly low to the ground. Or you could plant roses or make it a perennial bed. For a little French glamour, you could make a parterre, with low, neatly clipped boxwoods or yews. To keep the directions as simple as possible, we’re going to describe how to do a pretty easy square, one with two-foot wide paths and twofoot wide “walls” or beds. If you’re a geometry wiz, you can make something more complex. localgardener.net
