The back garden of the cottage is sheltered on the north by very tall and thick hedges either side of the driveway, made of Leyland cypress (that fast-growing American conifer now rather unpopular in Britain for blocking off neighbours' views). A ladder stands in the driveway, leaning against the hedge (someone has been at the many-month task of clipping), and from twelve feet up you get a view.

PICTURE: Church Cottage back garden from ladder

The maze in the Church Cottage garden is a small and easy one, made of only three concentric rings of low hedges around a rockery that once was the only feature interrupting the lawn. It took about an hour to mark out the circles with string and bits of stick, perhaps a week to plant (a few inches apart) two hundred or so tiny clippings of two different colors of box, given by a friend who worked in the Yawl Hill nursery (each clipping dipped in a root hormone)—oh, an hour or two before to dig shallow trenches in the turf so that the clippings wouldn't be lost among the grass. Then it took five years of mowing along the paths and laborious weeding around the clippings, and buying and planting a few dozen replacements for the little bushes that hadn't grown (some replacements were clippings from a different and faster-growing shrub, lonicera), and finally the pleasure of trimming them as they at last began to look like a hedge a foot high.

The maze had a simple structure: a straight way in to a circle around the rockery (where poppies and sunflowers and strawberries and others grew), one dead-end path, one last-found path that folded back past the beginning and all around and to the goal, which was the exit on the far side. The dream was that, starting from that exit, other pieces of maze, of different kinds, could gradually be added, subtracting from the boringness of the lawn and perhaps eventually incorporating the whole garden (including the wild end left for birds). For instance there was a soft rank-growing hollow in the lawn (because of moles underneath?—it was dubbed at first Mole Haven—or more likely a spring or some other source of water): it could perhaps become a pool set within the maze.

A hedge maze doesn't have to have high hedges. It could be, on top of being a maze, a knot garden, like that seen at Winchcombe Castle in the Cotswolds. A knot garden is one in which miniature hedges cross and are trimmed at slightly different heights, so that they look like pieces of string crossing over each other.

(The maze was destroyed by the next (non-vegetarian) owners of the house, to make space for, of all things, a paved barbecue area. But that was their legal right and mattered little in the larger scheme of things; mazes continue to grow as ideas, and there is some reaction against the replacing of vegetation by decks and patios, as people realize that the songbirds that depend on berries and insects are dying out in Britain.)

A maze is the only good way of making a garden. To rephrase more fairly: once you've conceived of a maze as the theme for a garden, others recede in interest. A lawn, especially a monocultural one that has been thoroughly rid of "weeds", is barren. You only need a little one to sprawl on in the sun. But even flowerbeds and formations of shrubs usually run just either along or across; isn't there something more meaningful? I had an earlier garden that had been a scrubby little desert, and I began to buy plants and stick them in, and after a while I realized that whatever they were they could be organized in curved lines, and the lines might as well cohere into some kind of pervasive shape, and the shape might as well mystify.

PICTURE: Daedalus and Lenore maze