In the January/February 2009 issue of The Iowan

Landscape

Contemplating the Landscape      

Nature and design combine in serene form.

[ Story by Emily Grosvenor   |   Photography by Shuva Rahim ]

On a mild October morning, Stan McCadam and Manley Orum stand staring at a broad patch of green. The feathery plumes atop the ‘Karl Foerster’ reed grass bend gently above low-lying Kentucky bluegrass and timothy. McCadam, standing next to a 21-inch Craftsman push mower, is the idea man. He’s got plans to place signage to draw people to this winding swath. For Orum, the mechanical expert in the endeavor, this place is almost holy — reason enough for more people to come, in his opinion. A zero-turn 38-inch Toro riding mower sits at the ready, soon to again be steered through the pattern sculpted before them in the turf — a subtly twisting spiral with an open entrance and a path leading to a center. Today’s discussion surrounds not the landscape design, on which they agreed some time ago, but its refinement. To mow or not to mow? Today, they mow.

This is a labyrinth — a work of landscape art that these retirees hatched in their free time and created with their own hands. But unlike a menacing maze that aims to perplex and challenge (and often frustrate), this labyrinth is created to soothe and focus, offering people a relaxing and perhaps contemplative stroll in a natural setting. A barefoot walk through this labyrinth at the Cedar Valley Arboretum and Botanic Gardens (just outside of downtown Waterloo) — one of over two dozen labyrinths built in Iowa over the past decade — settles the soul and prepares visitors to explore the rest of the gardens. And since the path doesn’t actually lead anywhere beyond the center of the circle, there is no need to make haste.

“Our communities need more of this type of thing,” says Orum, a former supervisor at a local packaging plant who, with fellow retiree McCadam, built the labyrinth in the summer of 2007. “Everybody is in a big hurry doing nothing.”

The labyrinth is an ancient design — varying in size, shape, and pattern — used by cultures around the world for private meditation. As with all forms of art, how people respond to a labyrinth depends on the individual. Some people find that walking one helps them relax and unwind; others experience labyrinths as a way to focus problem solving. Some artists and writers even use them to work through roadblocks in their creative processes. “It can be whatever you make of it,” says McCadam.



Connecting with the Natural World
Over the past 15 years, a labyrinth renaissance has taken form as public gardens, hospitals, retreat centers, and schools have crafted permanent geometric patterns of vastly differing materials to offer a place for contemplation. Iowans, too, are building these walkable earth sculptures — and the people are coming.

Near Hiawatha on the outskirts of Cedar Rapids, amid rolling hills where crickets and butterflies outcompete the roar of Interstate 380, sits one of Iowa’s oldest permanent labyrinths. Carved into a hillside amid a glen of basswood trees and sculpted using sand and bricks, the 36-foot-wide labyrinth mimics a Zen sand garden writ large. This labyrinth, built in the Medieval Chartres design, functions as a structural keystone of Prairiewoods Franciscan Spirituality Center, a 70-acre retreat site run by the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration of La Crosse, Wisconsin. Franciscans believe that divinity reveals itself in nature, and Prairie Woods offers this labyrinth as a space that opens people up to a connection with the natural world. 

“We were interested in the labyrinth as a metaphor for the spiritual path,” says Betty Daugherty, a sister at the center who helped plan and build the labyrinth in 1999. “The experience of walking it fits well with the desires of people who are trying to explore their spirituality.”

Daugherty and her colleagues chose the Chartres design because of its widespread use in the churches of medieval Europe (its name refers to a famous cathedral in France) and because of her own aesthetic response to it. “I liked the symmetry of it,” she explains. “There’s a wholeness there, within that circle.”

The labyrinth, which is open to the public during the center’s regular hours, attracts both local visitors and temporary walkers staying overnight at the center’s two small, solar-powered cottages. As the clouds sweep away and the sun bears its full light on the sand, the labyrinth’s path reveals itself to be awash with footsteps. Daugherty says labyrinth walkers will often sit on the rock in the middle long enough to become part of the landscape. Deer often walk right up and share the space. “You never know what little surprise you’re going to come across there,” she says.



A Celebration of the Iowa Landscape
Some Iowans inspired to create labyrinths can’t stop building them. Mary Dreier of Hubbard has already carved three labyrinths into the land on her family’s farm. A few years ago Dreier looked at a patch of grass next to the entrance to her homestead and got the urge to mow a pattern in it. Using a simple push mower, she sculpted a Chartres pattern into the land. “When I build labyrinths I know I’m not destroying the earth but adding to it,” she says.

Dreier sees building labyrinths as one way to express her creativity. She is especially drawn to the work of ceramic artist Andy Goldsworthy, whose work features natural, earth-based shapes. Drier uses the labyrinths in her work as a spiritual director and facilitator at Soul of the Prairie, a retreat center located on her farm.

The second labyrinth Dreier built was equally impromptu. One morning she looked out over a swatch of grass in a glen of trees to the north of her home and decided to mow a free-form spiral into it. She calls the looping pathway, framed by delicate Queen Anne’s lace, a “dancing spiral” because walking it, she insists, makes you want to dance. “The spiral is so huge for me,” says Dreier, who also bakes spiral cinnamon buns. “Perhaps it is indicative of my path ever inward.”

The crowning glory of her homestead is the three-acre restored prairie labyrinth cut into the hillside east of the farm’s chicken coop turned meeting space. It is formed in a Cretan spiral, the same design, described in Greek mythology, that held the fearsome Minotaur. With teeming masses of prairie grasses, black-eyed susans, goldenrod, wild yarrow, purple clover, and bottle gentian reaching high above the walker’s head, it is almost impossible to see the design for the prairie. The effect is an intoxicating stroll through Iowa’s virgin ground.

“This is Iowa’s landscape,” says Dreier of her prairie labyrinth. “For me this is the way this land was before we built our fences and put in our tile.”



Clearing the Path
The ground was still frozen when McCadam and Orum began discussing ideas in the winter of 2007. They were both looking for a small project they could call their own. Something different. Something creative and surprising that could be accomplished with minimal time commitment. A labyrinth fit the bill.
“We’re retired. We don’t want to put in too much overtime,” jokes McCadam.

In the spring of 2007, the two retirees searched the Web and downloaded a design — the simple Baltic Classic ­— that employs undulating curves that snake in two loops around a center point. A few months later they marked the pattern in the grass using stakes and wash-away paint and started up their mowers. “We were striving for a balance that was pleasing to the eye and that incorporates the prairie grasses,” explains McCadam.

Working in the spirit of community that defines everything about these volunteer-run gardens, the two men tweaked the original design to allow for two paths into the labyrinth — one that measures 300 feet and one only 30 feet, the latter accommodating wheelchairs and people who can’t walk long distances — both leading to the center’s metal pyramid trellis draped in morning glories, moonflowers, and black-eyed susans.

For over a year now the labyrinth has offered a place for quiet reflection for students of next-door Hawkeye Community College, a moment of respite for the many visitors to the gardens, and, sometimes, a playground for kids, who take to the labyrinth without any introduction.

McCadam’s and Orum’s work continues. As an almost entirely natural piece of landscape art, this small patch of grass could easily be gobbled back up by the earth. “This loses its appeal if it’s not maintained,” cautions McCadam, underscoring the labyrinth’s fragility with a quick snap of the fingers. “It could be gone just like that.”

Their hope is that many will come to the garden and take the path they have cleared. And so the men meet every week to mow the labyrinth — the walking path first cut to about an inch by the Toro, then polished down to ¼–½ inch with the Craftsman, leaving the outlining turf at 3½ to 4 inches. Taking just 30 minutes or so, it’s a quick job — and as McCadam will tell you, mowing can be meditative, too.     • • •



Cedar Valley Arboretum
and Botanical Gardens
Location: Waterloo
Design: Baltic Loop
Materials: cultivated and native grass
Hours: Daily, dawn to dusk, April 1–October 1st
319-226-4966
www.cedarvalleyarboretum.org

Soul of the Prairie
Location: Hubbard
Design: Chartres, spiral, Cretan
Hours: Call for availability
641-864-3256
www.souloftheprairie.com

Prairie Woods
Location: Hiawatha
Design: Chartres
Hours: Open during daylight hours
319-395-6700
www.prairiewoods.org

READ MORE  Other Labyrinths

READ MORE  Building a Labyrinth

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