The Unending Mystery by David W. McCullough

Author:David W. McCullough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307429513
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Near Hannover, Germany, a seventeenth-century octagonal puzzle maze still exists in remarkably good condition in the Herrenhausen Gardens. Nearly seventy-five feet across, it was built soon after 1666 and rebuilt in 1937 and again in the 1970s. Originally designed by an associate of Versailles’s Le Nôtre, it has somehow managed to survive better than the French designs that probably inspired it. When it came to sheer numbers, the Dutch may have been the most enthusiastic maze builders from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Garden mazes—doolhofs, confusion gardens—were everywhere, in bourgeois gardens, country estates and royal palaces. Amsterdam had two that were even open to the public, the Oude Doolhof and the Nieuwe Doolhof. None, either private or public, has survived. Besides their appeal to Holland’s strong gardening tradition, doolhofs also had a bawdy reputation. One in Middachten was said to have been closed by the local lord for being “the venue for secret love affairs.” The seventeenth-century Dutch poet Jacob Cats wrote (in a translation quoted by a Netherlands labyrinth group):

The way young people stupidly spin around each other Resembles a garden with a thousand detours

A garden, an entangled web, and still

one considers wandering a pleasant game.

The garden, a special place, where everyone with desire

fulfils his lust with a thousand turn-arounds.

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