Oh this is epic. What an ambitious idea. (And there's me trying to muster the energy to plant out this one rose that's been sitting in a plastic pot in a bed for a week. )
No advice on a maze but please have a minotaur or similar in the middle. I remember your other thread and am genuinely delighted you got your peonies.
Bunny Guinness works a lot with yew and has a lot of the high hedging on her own land she put in herself (featured in her other videos). It didn't take 100 years to grow. One thing I like about the tours of her gardens is that she gives you a time line; her plants and trees have grown surprisingly fast; she makes the right choices and gives them the right care, which she describes.
I think you would like a lot of Bunny's ideas, designs and videos - worth following. Pretty classical.
I think a maize maze ( or something else annual) would be more fun as you could have a different layout each year for your kids to work out - you could also redesign the area if the maze lost its novelty value.
If you had a permanent maze in your garden you’d soon know your way round it so it’s probably more fun for visitors than anyone living there.
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”—Marcus Tullius Cicero East facing, top of a hill clay-loam, cultivated for centuries (7 years by me). Birmingham
You need at least a couple of acres ... preferably more ... for a maize maze to work ... you need lots of rows of maize between the pathways in order for them not to be 'see through-able'. so that folk can properly 'get lost' in them. .. There are lots of them here in East Anglia ...
Children don't need complicated, they just want to have fun.
Not quite the same, but when I was little I read all the Pat Smythe books and was madly into show jumping. I used to get the shears and cut circuits on our pocket handkerchief lawn, add 'jumps' with sticks on bricks and my brother and I had great fun being horses and having show jumping contests. Cost nothing but kept us entertained for ages.
You could mow a maze and the children could see who could run round fastest without making mistakes and losing points, or who could do it with their eyes shut or walking backwards. The next week you could mow another one with a different pattern, or they could design their own and decide which one to have made for them.
They'll get bored with mazes after a while and move on to something else. In my case it was rearing caterpillars and having caterpillar races
My feeling is that a maze that is even half way to being grandiose would cost a lot of money, need considerable upkeep, divert land away from another use that, down the line, you might prefer and take so long to come to fruition it would be your grandchildren not your children who’d be enjoying it.
Is there scope for setting bricks into a lawn into a maze pattern? A simpler structure could still provide much fun as Buttercupdays illustrates, or the young ‘uns could do what they used to do at Wing maze (mentioned earlier on) and be penitents shuffling round on their knees saying their prayers.
Grass quickly grows over bricks so if your tire of the idea or want to refresh the design it shouldn’t be necessary to dig up the bricks. As an alternative to bricks you might be able to use those car parking reinforcing grids that grass grows through. It would then be unobtrusive.
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How many plants do you think you would need for this?
How long to grow from saplings?
Fantastic idea, but it would be for your grandchildren.
When you don't even know who's in the team
S.Yorkshire/Derbyshire border
No advice on a maze but please have a minotaur or similar in the middle. I remember your other thread and am genuinely delighted you got your peonies.
East facing, top of a hill clay-loam, cultivated for centuries (7 years by me). Birmingham
Yew plants @ 40cms high £20-25 each
Density 3 per metre.
Approx. 1500 required.
If you can afford it and can wait for it to grow, go for it.
When you don't even know who's in the team
S.Yorkshire/Derbyshire border
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGn3Sc9gHCQ
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Is there scope for setting bricks into a lawn into a maze pattern? A simpler structure could still provide much fun as Buttercupdays illustrates, or the young ‘uns could do what they used to do at Wing maze (mentioned earlier on) and be penitents shuffling round on their knees saying their prayers.
Grass quickly grows over bricks so if your tire of the idea or want to refresh the design it shouldn’t be necessary to dig up the bricks. As an alternative to bricks you might be able to use those car parking reinforcing grids that grass grows through. It would then be unobtrusive.