Hedging and hedges – hedge mazes

Ask anyone to name their favourite maze and it's a good bet most people would chose the world- famous hedge maze at Hampton Court Palace, near London, which is the UK's oldest surviving hedge maze and because it has twists and turns and dead-ends, it’s known as a multicursal or puzzle maze. Hampton Court maze was commissioned in around 1690 by King William III after he arrived in England with his wife Queen Mary to take over the English throne. Its unusual trapezoid shape covers a third of an acre and it contains half a mile of paths. It was originally planted in Hornbeam but at some point in the eighteenth century this was taken out and the maze was replanted in Yew.

Previously the unicursal or single path maze was the most common form of maze in England. A unicursal maze has a single path winding to the centre, usually in a spiral, and is also called a labyrinth.

Just about all the other historic hedge mazes in the UK date from the nineteenth century. These include the splendid laurel maze at Glendurgan House in Cornwall which was first planted in 1833 and restored by the National Trust in 1996. At Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk, William Nesfield designed the surviving yew maze, with a pagoda on a mound at the centre – which is welcome because your feet ache when you’ve got that far! And Lord Egerton copied the design of the Hampton Court Maze in around 1890 to create the beech maze at Tatton Park in Greater Manchester.

Hedge gardening maze photograph by Joe Shlabotnik, used under a creative commons attribution licence

 

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