The Maze That Came Back

A maze belonged to a baroque garden the way a fountain and a tree-lined avenue did, and the one at Schönbrunn, laid out around the middle of the eighteenth century, counted as one of the largest in Europe.

 

The thinking behind it went beyond amusement. A court that took itself seriously wanted to show it could bend nature to its will, and a maze was the clearest proof of that: thousands of shrubs, all clipped to exactly the same height, arranged in a pattern you could only make sense of from somewhere higher up.

 

By the nineteenth century the fashion had passed, and the whole plot was dug out. What you see now was laid out again in 1999, from a 1720 plan that had survived in the archive, so the wrong turns you are about to take are the very same turns the court got lost in three hundred years ago.

 

Beside it there is a playground with mirrors and climbing frames, which suits this park well, since from the very beginning it was meant as a place to lose an afternoon.

 

We follow the broad avenue east toward the great fountain below the hill.