Garden Troy: French Gardens

Something of this sort exists in the concentric earthworks of Maiden Castle in Dorset and probably existed at Troy. There is a picture of the traditional Shepherd's Maze labeled TROY on an Etruscan wine jar. The next stage is more difficult for the modern mind to follow. The `mystery' created by complexity suggests magic; magic becomes associated with the pattern rather than with the physical difficulty presented by the obstacles. It appears to follow, then, that the pattern itself is the protection and needs only to be two-dimensional! Evil spirits from China to Peru are known to travel in straight lines and to hate confused passages; that is why witches surround themselves with magic circles. In this way Troy lay safe behind her complex walls and the treasure of Minos was snug in a labyrinth. In ancient Rome the game of Troy, which involved threading a maze pattern, was popular with children. Roman maze pavements have been found so often that they were probably as common as hard tennis courts are now. In the Middle Ages these magical patterns were taken by the Church for her own purposes and the ancient winding way was inscribed on church floors and followed by penitents on their knees; if the centre were called Jerusalem it lessened the penance of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to practical proportions. True labyrinths of hedges were made in gardens like that which Charles V planted at the Alhambra and the famous one still at Hampton Court, but in the fields the ancient patterns were merely cut out in the turf and not only children but adults also followed them, probably without knowing why. It was no far step to cut these turf mazes in the garden and to plant them with flowers. They were a familiar object and men's minds were prepared for patterns of this sort. Despite Bacon and other objectors the parterre in the sense of a pattern on the ground continued in favour until the eighteenth century, and enjoyed a powerful revival in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth, when it was reviled under the name of mosaiculture.