History of Living Lattice Labyrinth

This may be going back further than you want but it gives a good background on the designer of this unique and beautiful creation known as the Living Lattice Labyrinth.

Rik Dillon is the designer and creator of the living Lattice labyrinth.  He and his wife Lisa, developed and set up Amaze ‘n’ Place in Alstonville, northern NSW – in the picturesque Ballina/Byron hinterland.

Go here if you’re interested in more of Rik’s background.

History of this maze

The Living Lattice Labyrinth (as we call the maze) is the result of collaboration between the owner, Rik, his brother, Mike and Lisa.  After many years of work involving design, experimentation, propagation, planting and training we ended up with a maze of unique look and experience.

Design

The first stage was designing the layout of the maze.

Rik made hundreds of drawings and grids before a design was decided upon.  This was then mowed in the long grass in a paddock and family and friends were invited to walk it as a test.  We didn’t want to spend years growing a maze, only to discover at the end that it had a design flaw.  If you think walking a maze is difficult, it’s easy compared to walking it before it is even there.  Trying to work out where to mow working from a piece of paper was a nightmare!!

However, the exercise proved to be a very valuable approach.

What worked on paper did not work so well in full size, in real life – it was much too easy.

After watching how people walked the maze and how they made their decisions the current design was created – working against some of the logic people utilised in a maze.

Method

One of the dilemmas of a hedge maze is the amount of pruning required.  The Living Lattice Labyrinth has over 2km of pathways.  This means that there is over 6km to prune (both sides and the top).  To reduce the pruning many mazes are created using a slow growing hedge variety.  The down side to this approach is that it can take over 15 years to establish a maze.

Another problem with traditional hedges is that they cannot be pruned back the same amount each time –particularly in the rows of a maze where the sun may not be so abundant.  Trying to prune back to the same thickness exposes the hard wood and the hedge doesn’t reshoot – leaving bare sections.  This results in the hedge getting thicker and the rows getting narrower.

Because of these limitations many maze owners opt for the quick-and-easy solution – a wooden walled maze.  These can be set up very quickly and need very little maintenance.  However, they do not have the beauty or ambience of a hedge maze.

Our method of growing addresses most of these challenges and results in a beautiful and magical maze experience.

Rik discussed with Mike what plants to use with the aim of reducing the long term maintenance of the maze.  He had the vision of a wall of intertwined trees and the concept was hatched.  His experience as a wholesale nurseryman proved invaluable in propagating and growing the maze.

It was decided to use ficus for the hedging plant as it is one of the hardiest of plants.  We knew that what we were planning was going to put a lot of stress on the plants and ficus had the best chance of survival.  It was also suitable for inosculating – the method of creating the ‘wall’.

Propagation

In 1997 10,980 trees were propagated at Mike’s nursery in Queensland.  These ‘babies’ consisted of 3 leaves each and were about 4cm high ( 1½”) . They were then nurtured in a huge shade-house for 2 years in pots – weeded, staked and pruned – re-potted to bigger pots and continually weeded staked and pruned.  Rik jokes that he knows them all by name!!

Transportation

In 1999 this property in Alstonville was bought and we started preparation for the maze.  The trees were transported down in triple deck trucks.  This was quite an ordeal as the trees were now 1.5 metres tall.   We loaded the truck in the morning, followed it for the 4 hour journey and then unloaded before doing it again the next day.  We only had one mishap and lost quite a fee trees when one of the upper shelves collapsed in the truck, crushing our ‘babies’ below.

The trees were then re-potted into planter bags (heavy duty plastic bags with holes in the bottom for the roots).  Then they were planted in the bottom corner of the property and were tended for another 3 years until they were 2.5 metres tall.

Planting

Now came the job of the planting and the opportunity to test all the theories that we’d discussed about how to do it.

There were many challenges yet to face.

• How to map the maze so that the trees were in the right position
• How close to each other to plant them
• What angle to put them on
• How to tie them
• How to support them while they grew and how we’d be able to move in the area
• How to make the corners and the junctions

We excavated the pad for the maze to create an area that was comfortable for strolling on but also with enough slope to get the water to run off.  We then arranged a grid of overhead support wires to hold the trees and help with the correct placement of the trees.  Excavating the pad wasn’t without its difficulties.  Red tape became a problem and you can read about the vagaries of trying to work with council.

The planting commenced in 2001 and took 3 years – planting in spring and summer – the best growing seasons.

We continued with the trial and error to get the best result with the trees.  Much experimentation which resulted in many trees being planted and dug up several times.  Similarly, many were tied and untied as we sorted out the tying method and even developed a special tool.  Of course trees don’t grow straight so many had to be strained and twisted to get them into alignment and the right position.  Unfortunately, often this strain was too much and many trees cracked and broke and had to be replaced.  This replacement caused another headache.

We had a few set-backs during planting.

The first 300 trees planted got blown over in a storm and over half of them had to be replanted.  During a particularly heavy storm we had some large washaways and had to move a lot of soil and replant lots of trees.  We had a panic when we thought the trees had developed a serious disease and all the tips started to die.  After much research and several trips to the Agricultural Institute we were embarrassed to discover it was frost damage. Didn’t know we ever had frost here on the plateau – very rare.

We did have quite a few trees die due to the stress and strain of the process.  We also lost many due to the heat.

It was in December and I was determined to complete the planting before Christmas.  I, and my son Tim, worked very hard to get them planted and, unfortunately, there was a very hot dry spell.  Tim complained but, like a typical father, I told him it wasn’t too bad and just keep on going.  He took the kitchen thermometer and measured over 40oc in the shade and over 50oc in the sun!!  He and I survived but I spent a lot of January replacing trees that hadn’t survived.

The only other hiccoughs were a few misplaced sections.  Most were picked up quite quickly (not all) and some were left as they made virtually no difference to the complexity.  There were some minor redesigns as I went.  One of these was the installation of the internal gates to facilitate changing the pattern of the maze.

We almost had a disaster as the placement of one of the gates was not well planned.  Had we changed that gate while someone was inside they would have been locked into one section!!!!  Luckily I saw it in time.

Most of what we designed and the methods used worked well and we’re extremely happy with the result – so are hundreds of our visitors.

A couple of set-backs were caused by the method of tying and the timing of pruning.

We discovered that the wire ties we used could be left on the plant and the tree would just grow over it without any detrimental affect.  The only problem was that there was a period where the tie position was relatively weak due to the wire cutting in to the wood.  During the growing phase (before we opened) we tended to leave a lot of foliage on the top of the trees to encourage general growth.  If we got rain and wind at the wrong time the whole top of the tree would break off and we’d have to replace it.

One of the unusual results of the inosculation (the act of growing together) was the route that the nutrients took.  In several locations the trees have directed their life-blood in a zigzag path between the roots and the leaves.   This has starved some sections and caused them to die and fall away.  The resulting formation adds to the interest and uniqueness.

A few design tricks

After walking many mazes in Australia I decided on a few features that I wanted to incorporate.

I found dead-ends very frustration so this maze does not have any.  You can walk around in circles for quite a while but you are never forced to back-track.

We explored more than a dozen mazes in Victoria before designing the Living Lattice Labyrinth and every one was solved using, what I call, the left or right-hand-method.  This technique involves putting a hand on one wall and maintaining this contact as you go through all the twists and turns.  Here at Amaze ‘n’ place you get a detailed tour of the outside wall of the maze and come back out of the entrance – you do not get to the centre tower.

Another design trick was the inclusion of lockable gates.  To avoid regular visitors memorising the route these gates can be changed to change the pattern of the maze.  A path that last time took you in the right direction now leads you into a different direction.

There are 4 of these gates and were a late inclusion (added during planting).

This late inclusion also allowed an error to creep in. We discovered that if the gates are in a certain configuration then the left or right-hand-rule would work.  Consequently we never set the gates in this way.

We decided not install one of the gates just before we opened (there were to be 5).  We discovered that in one position it made the maze much easier. This section of trees was much smaller than the rest for the first two years but have now caught up with the others – see if you can work out where it was.

We have only changed one section of the maze since it was established.  This involved moving a section that was nearly 4 metres long.  The trees were all well inosculated at this stage so it took a lot of work to separate the section, dig up as much of the root system as possible and to lift, turn and re-plant the section.  We were not optimistic that they would survive.  However, figs are tremendously hardy and, with lots of TLC (tender loving care) it all survived.

Future Plans

We will be constantly adding new statues and things to find and as well as making up extra quiz sheets.  The Seekers Games have been even more popular than we anticipated.  We now have sheets with rhyming clues and one with cryptic clues.

We have plans for a wooden maze alongside the Living Lattice Labyrinth which will be a little more difficult as you won’t be able to see through and plan your route as much (more like a traditional maze).

We also have plans for a children’s maze (very low hedge) and a meditative unicursal maze under our mango tree.

Rik’s History

Rik’s interest in puzzles and puzzling things goes right back to his early childhood when he used to pull toys apart to see how they worked.  He often lost interest in putting them back together and his younger brother, Mike, still bemoans the fact that Rik took his fire engine apart and never reassembled it.  It was an amazing piece of ingenuity.  It would run along the ground, stop, the ladder would spring up and extend and the bell would ring and lights would flash.  This was quite amazing at the time as it was the mid 1950s, long before electronics in toys.

Rik was always tinkering with things mechanical.  Of course he had the usual billy carts and push bikes.  His father was a genius with wood and a great influence, helping build many billy carts.  However, most of Rik’s interest in mechanical things he developed himself by pulling things apart and (mostly) putting them back together.

Due to limited funds as a teenager he bought a motorbike instead of a car.  This led to a deeper interest in things mechanical as he worked on his own bike and those of friends.  He made them go faster and faster & eventually stopped riding on the road as it was too dangerous and started road-racing.  He even raced at Bathust a couple of times!

One of his early jobs after high school was for a company called Burroughs.  There he worked on mechanical adding machines, cash registers and comptometers.  These were wondrous machines, full of levers and springs, cams and actuators.  He eventually worked his way up to be one of the best technicians on the mechanical accounting machines.  These were probably the most complex piece of mechanical equipment that you could fit on a desk – and it needed a large one at that!

Even though they were mechanical they were programmable.  They had up to 27 separate memories and the top of the range even had a typewriter built in that had a linkage mechanism that had to be seen to be believed.  To him it was a constant puzzle to track down which lever, actuator, cam and spring did and why it may not have been doing what it was supposed to and correct it.

Unfortunately, his skill with these machines was to hold him back.  It was the start of the age of electronics and the first calculators and mini-computers (a whole large desk) were just being introduced.  His company was one of the leaders computers and calculators and he was keen to get into this field.  However, no-one was being trained on the mechanical machines anymore, they were going straight to the electronics and Rik was needed to service the existing machines.

A few jobs later he ends up working for a Locksmith.

inosculating

in·os·cu·late

verb (used without object), verb (used with object), -lat·ed, -lat·ing.

1. to unite by openings, as arteries in anastomosis.
2. to connect or join so as to become or make continuous, as fibres; blend.
3. to unite intimately.

(with thanks to Dictionary.com)

Excavation

We had put in our development application for the maze and associated buildings and were confident about approval.  Unfortunately, it was taking longer than expected and the trees needed to be planted during the upcoming spring.  We decided to go ahead with the excavation of the pad for the maze (the land was a little too steep for a comfortable stroll).

However, council were not happy and sent a letter saying we could not do any works while there was a Development Application (DA) pending.  I contacted them to say that if the DA was approved we would be able to level the land and if the DA failed we could still level the land without permission to plant trees as it is a rural property.  They agreed but said I still couldn’t excavate as there was a DA pending!!!

Luckily, by the time we’d completed this communication, the excavator had finished and we could plant in spring.

Replacement Headache

A maze creates many of its own unique problems.

The distance in a maze is never as the crow flies.  This lesson I learnt very early – particularly in remembering to keep all my tools with me.  “Where did I leave my spade?  Oh, there it is. How do I get there?”

Sometimes we needed to dig a dead tree out.  Some  died due to strain, some die due to breaking when being forced into line.

To dig a tree out you need to get to both sides of it.  Each side of the tree is in a different path of the maze.  From one side of the tree to the other may only be 100mm but it may be 1,000 times that (100 metres) to walk it!!!

Our constant worry for many years was that many of the trees would just keel over and die from the stress of the process.

This ‘tyranny of distance’ was also important when laying the gravel and when pruning.