Maze in the Making

A team of two from ‘Patalab travelled to a chateau in the south of France to witness and participate in transferring our design for a maze from scaled drawings to a 1:1 mark up on the landscape.

Marking out the maze was a process that took the contractor back to basics with wooden pegs, string and fundamental rules of geometry. First of all, a principal corner point was established and a Pythagorean triangle made of wooden pegs set out the right angle from which the centre of the maze could be established. Concentric rings were then set out and divided into 12 segments to create a workable area for the maze’s configuration of passages and dead ends to be mapped over in spray paint by the Patalab team and the chateau’s gardeners.

Eventually, hedges will be planted over the paint and pegs to flourish around a central tower assembled from reclaimed architectural features from a collapsing manor house also on site. From this vantage point, an aerial view of one of Europe’s largest mazes will unfold in front of the rest of the gardens and a chestnut orchard tended to by a herd of alpacas.