ALICE’S MAZE

Can you find the way out ?

If you are young at heart, then you’ll love the Alice in Wonderland maze at Rivau.

It’s shaped like the head of the Cheshire Cat, the cat that appears and disappears in Lewis Carroll‘s novel Alice in Wonderland. And it embodies all the author’s playful fantasy. You’ll come face to face with the gardener-soldiers, Humpty Dumpty (the egg-headed character from the novel), the flamingo covered in pink clematis, and of course the White Rabbit. All the characters from the book have been reinterpreted by artist Jean-Jack Martin, who has clothed them in climbing plants, botany obliges.

You will also be lulled by the music of childhood nursery rhymes such as “J’ai descendu dans mon Jardin” (“I went down to my garden”), arranged in a contemporary style.

If you are afraid of getting lost, ask one of your friends to climb up the nearby belvedere, where they will have a bird’s eye view and can guide you out. From the top of the tower, you can see the cat’s outline and admire the five thousand hornbeams that make up the maze’s structure. In winter, there hedges shelter the many insects that contribute to the garden’s biodiversity.