The Backyard Labyrinth

Posted On July 8, 2020

I built a five-circuit labyrinth in the backyard using a weed-wacker, a tomato spiral, and bits of string.

Last winter, I was sitting in my home office and happened to pick up a booklet (⇓) that was on my desk. I noticed the picture of a Chartres-style labyrinth on the front cover and for reasons not completely clear to me it caught my attention. Since then I have been pondering how to draw labyrinths, how to use them for meditation, and how to go about constructing one for personal use.

Planning (Or, As Some Call It, Overthinking)

I needed to answer a number of questions before my labyrinth came into being. Where do we have the space? What type of materials should I use? How big can it be? How do you practically make the thing in the selected physical space?

Where?

I don’t have access to a public space for this type of project. The question came down to, “Front yard or backyard?” I opted for the backyard because it is more private. If I really messed up, not many people would see the desolation wrought upon the earth.

What materials?

You can do some fairly permanent installations with stones, brick, pavers, and the like. This can be pretty labour-intensive and expensive. If you don’t even know if you will like the result, this is not the first place to go. I wanted something temporary, at least for the first try.

At first, I had the notion of using field-marking chalk to draw a labyrinth on the grass, then passing over the lines with a lawnmower. This was a can of worms. Where do you get field-marking chalk, particularly in a pandemic? It seems to be sold in 50-pound bags, so I would have enough to do a labyrinth for all my neighbours, too. (They were not asking.) I don’t have a cart to distribute the chalk and didn’t want to spend a few hundred bucks to get one.

I thought of using a funnel that I would block and unblock as needed when laying down the lines. How would I maintain a constant path radius when laying down the chalk? How long would the chalk marks last? Did I really want to have a bunch of chalked lines on the ground anyway? It became evident that this was not the solution.

A long time later it occurred to me that simplest is best. We have an old weed-wacker (or more properly, a nylon-line grass trimmer) that we never use. It cuts an 8-inch swath of grass, so I could use it to carve out a pathway in the lawn of the backyard.

If I placed a stake in the ground at the desired centre point and looped a measured piece of string over the handle of the weed wacker and the stake, I could cut a path with a constant radius by holding the string taut. This also had the advantage of only using tools we already had and therefore not costing anything.

How big?

After a bit of trial and error on a separate patch of grass, I concluded that a radial difference of 15 inches between circles would give a reasonable separation between paths with a workable path width. If I made the central circle — the destination — with a 15-inch radius and path radii every 15 inches after that, an eleven-circuit labyrinth would be 30 feet across. Too big for the available space.

A five-circuit labyrinth would be 15 feet across — about the maximum for the space and also a more manageable size for a first effort.

How do you actually do this?

“Begin with the end in mind,” as Stephen Covey famously said. If you are going to make a labyrinth, first you have to draw it.

The design below is what I was aiming for. The entry path in this labyrinth aligns directly with the central path to the inner circle. In the eleven-circuit design described in another post, the entry path is offset from the central path. This difference gives the design a more-balanced look for the smaller labyrinth, but it leaves an unused portion of the second circle, as marked by the coloured square.

The drawing is rotated 90° clockwise relative to the drawing of the eleven-circuit labyrinth. This is for two reasons: it aligns with the photographs in this post, making it easier to see the intended design in the finished project, and it shows an orientation that allows you to enter the labyrinth from the West, facing East, which is conventional in labyrinth construction.

Mapping the Circuits

You can cut a circular path by looping a string around a central stake and the handle of a grass trimmer. However, you don’t want to cut full circles. The circuits must have a circular shape, but with breaks in places where the path loops back or turns corners. How do you know where to put in the breaks when you are actually cutting the paths? You need a map to work from that shows the circular paths and the breaks.

I drew the labyrinth plan with an iPad drawing app called Procreate and made a separate drawing layer for tracing the circuits onto the design. Since they were on separate layers, the labyrinth and the traced paths could be displayed or hidden independently. I drew the circuits, leaving a break every time I encountered a barrier.

Circuit Map

Once I finished tracing the labyrinth circuits, I hid the drawing layer with the labyrinth lines and printed out the map shown below. This map can be used as a guideline for cutting the labyrinth circuits.

Incorporating Turns and Straight Paths into the Map

I completed the map by joining up the loose ends of the circuits, as shown below, then printed it out separately. I found it easier to use the circuit map without the turns first, then the final map once I had cut the circuits into the grass.

Tools and Techniques

To make concentric circular paths, you need to have a fixed point at the centre of the circles. I used a tomato spiral, but you can use any type of stake. This was the easiest thing for me since we have a dozen or so in the garage. The photos below show the intended use of a tomato spiral and its off-label use as a fixed point in the construction of a labyrinth.

Guide Strings

I measured out two 15-foot lengths of string and set them at right angles. The strings intersected at the intended centre of the labyrinth, marking the placement of the central stake. The strings were stretched fairly taut and secured at each end with tent pegs.

These guide strings are important because almost all the path breaks are on either side of one of the lines. The main exceptions are the entry path and the straight path parallel to it.

Cutting the Circuits

The radii of the paths are at 15-inch intervals, as shown on the diagram below. With the central stake and the guidelines laid out, I measured a piece of string long enough for the longest radius plus a bit extra for loops at the ends.

I looped a 15-inch length of the string around the stake and the grass trimmer (loop it, don’t cut it!) and carved out the inner circle. When that was done, I loosened the string, looped it again to a 30-inch length and cut the second circle, leaving breaks as mapped. I repeated this with the remaining circles.

A Few Challenging Parts

After the circuits were complete, I began joining up the loose ends and discovered a few places where the paths were not obvious. These were in the area near the two straight paths in the labyrinth. When cutting the circular paths, there are breaks where the circuits intersect the straight paths. This leaves a few places, highlighted below, where it is not completely clear where these paths go. (In two of the cases — the rectangular highlights — it’s literally a matter of connecting the dots, but it’s not immediately easy to see this.)

Once these sections were dealt with, it was pretty simple to join up the remaining ends by following the final labyrinth map.

The Final Form

After a few tweaks, the final path looked like the photo below.

A Maintenance Enhancement

A couple of days later, it was evident that the grass inside the labyrinth would need regular trimming. To (hopefully) keep the grass down and to add some colour contrast, I added a layer of cedar mulch, which was the only cash outlay of the entire project.

It still seems to be necessary to regularly clean up the path with the grass trimmer, even with the mulch. And a rabbit has decided that one of the outside turns is a nice place to dig a burrow. Even the act of maintaining this installation is a continuing journey, but as with all such paths, you may not know where you are, but you are never lost.

Update: Seasonal Evolution

Here are a couple of photos after the first snow of 2020. (I rerouted the path to make it more like the pattern of a larger labyrinth. Can you spot the differences?)