| In 1996, the year the largest plant maze in the world was created at Reignac-sur-Indre in Touraine, 85,000 visitors came to admire and lose themselves in the middle of its 4-hectare (10-acre) expanse. Each year, a maze of corn or sunflowers emerges from the ground over the summer, is harvested in the autumn, and then reappears the following year in a different form, thanks to a well-proven technique of sowing and marking out. This site takes its inspiration from an older tradition in the art of landscaping. During the Renaissance, Italian gardens spawned an abundance of mazes in which people could walk, get lost, hatch plots, and exchange gossip. This lightheartedness somewhat dispelled the sacred and sometimes threatening character of the great old labyrinths associated with Gothic cathedrals and with the Minotaur in Greece, or further back still the hundreds of stone labyrinths known as “Troy Towns,” which are scattered along the shores of the Baltic. Were they used for sun rituals, for dancing, as Stations of the Cross, for initiation rites? The modern maze retains a little of the symbolic mystery attached to the “Streets of Jerusalem” and the “Walls of Jericho.” |
.&title2=The largest plant maze in the world, at Reignac-sur-Indre, Indre-et-Loire Department, France (47°13 "download in wallpaper")
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