I play with grass clippings

When I was a child, I loved making leaf houses in the fall. Little did I know that my talents in that direction would be useful again decades later. 

Once the mowers had cut the large circle in the field for the labyrinth, I had to decide where to place it inside that area  and then  get it "drawn" on the ground.  Here is the tiny slip of paper which was the road map. If you look carefully you can see where I have put dots indicating where to start the next line. Without the dots, the whole thing began to run together and swim before my eyes, so this one little addition was an invaluable help.

There are many ways to temporarily outline a labyrinth. You can use corn meal, that orange spray paint used to mark hydro and telephone lines, or even a stick drawn through the sand on a beach, just to name a few. I debated what to use, as I wanted to be able to change things easily if I miscalculated. Paint and cornmeal were therefore out. I had asked the mowers to leave the grass clippings in a pile in the centre, and I went from there. 

The first thing was to determine the diameter of the finished labyrinth. I decided on an 18" wide path with about six  inches for the boundary. That was about two feet, multiplied by seven for the circuits, then  multiplied by two to give the diameter: about 28 feet across. 

The rake was conveniently long, and I used it to measure off the general area on the mown grass. I was not too fussy about absolute accuracy — more about that in a subsequent blog.

Then I had to determine the initial layout or seed pattern: the cross-shape, the four L-shapes and the dots. Here is a sketch I just made. It's large enough to see the shapes. It is very important to get this right, as the whole rest of the design flows from this.

Making this configuration on the ground took a little bit of trial and error before I was happy with it. I am very concrete mathematically speaking. I had to try it out and see how it looked. (Glad I was not in Egypt when they built the pyramids or in medieval Europe with the Gothic cathedrals). 

By coincidence, the rock at the centre of the cross piece looks like a face. I thought this was a bit spooky but kind of cool. It bespeaks ancient wisdom perhaps.

So here is the cross piece: 

Now I have added the L-shapes, in such a way as to allow for an 18" path and, of course, the 6" boundary of grass clippings:

And finally,  the dots:

The distance between the dot and the L should allow for an 18" path. As I've noted, the windrow of grass gives about a 6" boundary:



It occurred to me that I could lose track of this original "seed" template once I got going with all the circuits, since the grass would just blend in, so I decided to use rocks to mark the sixteen points. The rocks are the green blobs  numbered from one to 16 in the drawing below:




We had accumulated a pile of rocks I'd gathered from the lawn periodically last summer before it was seeded. I had  saved them thinking they could be useful someday, and lo and behold they were:

Nice to have a strong person around to do the heavy lifting!

So here are the rocks placed at the ends of the cross-piece and the L's, and on top of the dots:

Here I have joined the first rock to the second and have started to join the 16th to the third. I kept checking my little slip of paper to make sure I was doing it correctly. 

Here I have begun the next circuit, heading from 15, just out of the picture to 4:

Now 15 to 4 is complete; at the right, you can see where I started to go a bit off-track before making the needed correction:



I checked now and again to make sure the path was close to 18" in width. This was a bit too wide. Fortunately, with grass clippings, all I had to do was rake them where I wanted them.

And around it went. Once I got the hang of it, I enjoyed the rhythm.  However, I kept checking to make sure I was joining the circuits properly.

The whole process took several hours, but I enjoyed it! Here is the finished template. Stay tuned: the next step is to make it more permanent.

Below, I have posted a link showing a faster way (15 minutes)  to do the same thing. Mind you, the preparation for the 15 minutes is so complicated it would have driven me crazy trying to get it right.

http://www.labyrinthos.net/layout.html

Also,  it seems overly mechanical: almost too fast and efficient. Joining things "by hand" felt more organic and I just felt good while raking it; it morphed into a sort of odd dance (start, go around, join, go back, then repeat getting wider and wider). The labyrinth came together little by little rather than all at once and as if by too swift magic. I guess I like my magic slow.