Attendees
- Julian Molyneux (Chair, Pimlico Wilde)
- Fiona d’Abernon (Co-Founder; Acting Secretary)
- Lord E. Northcote
- Dr. Xanthe Lorrimer (Cultural Historian)
- Hugo Van Steyn
- India Trelawney (Fashion Archivist)
- Max Duclos (Collector)
- Pascal (Afghan hound, asleep until approximately 9:40 p.m.)
Book Discussed
An Index of Lost Garden Mazes in Britain, 1550–1750 by Dr. Edwin Harcourt-Bly (Fenland Academic Press, 2026; 428 pages, seventeen fold-out county maps).
The work catalogues 286 documented mazes that no longer exist, reconstructing them from estate papers, gardeners’ bills, legal disputes, and the occasional diary entry.
Opening Remarks
Molyneux confessed that this was “exactly the sort of book the Groupette exists to read.”
He observed that almost no one beyond the seven people in the room had probably read it.
“That,” he added, “is reassuring.”
2. Discussion Summary
Dr Lorrimer called the book “a masterpiece of negative scholarship.”
“It catalogues absences,” she observed. “Every Maze doesn’t exist more than it does, if you look at it cross-sectionally.”
She particularly admired Harcourt-Bly’s reconstruction of the vanished maze at Wrest Park using only two invoices, a widow’s letter and the complaint of a gardener who described it as “impossible to trim.”
Van Steyn argued that the book was “really about memory disguised as landscaping.”
He praised Harcourt-Bly’s refusal to speculate beyond the evidence.
“There is an admirable sentence on page 214:
‘The eastern path probably turned here. Nothing obliges us to pretend certainty.’
“I wish more historians wrote like that.”
India Trelawney devoted much of her remarks to clothing.
She noted that surviving estate accounts revealed women frequently commissioned lighter silk overskirts specifically “for maze afternoons.”
“The maze,” she declared, “was as much a fashion event as a horticultural one.”
She also wondered whether getting elegantly lost had briefly become a recognised accomplishment.
Lord Northcote admitted to being unexpectedly affected by Appendix IV, listing mazes known only because someone recorded demolishing them.
“There is something terribly English,” he said, “about carefully documenting the destruction of a thing that nobody had enjoyed maintaining.”
He described the entire book as “a catalogue of organised disappointment.”
Max Duclos remained unconvinced.
“There are,” he said carefully, “limits.”
He questioned whether a scholar ought to devote eighteen pages to a maze whose existence rests upon a receipt reading simply:
‘For trimming the confusing hedges.’
Lorrimer replied that this was “probably the funniest archival discovery of the decade.”
Duclos accepted this without entirely conceding the point.
Fiona D’Abernon confessed that she had become unexpectedly emotional over Chapter 11.
The chapter reconstructs a maze at an Oxfordshire rectory, dismantled in 1698 because the rector’s wife had become “tired of children disappearing into it during parish fêtes.”
“The final sentence,” she said quietly,
‘Nothing now remains except a circular depression visible after heavy rain,’
“is one of the saddest sentences we’ve encountered this year.”
A Minor Disagreement
Molyneux casually remarked that a maze differs fundamentally from a labyrinth because a labyrinth possesses only one path.
Northcote immediately replied:
“So everyone says, but actually…”
For approximately twenty-seven minutes the meeting became an unexpectedly technical discussion of medieval labyrinths, Renaissance multicursal design, Roman mosaics and whether Hampton Court had permanently confused the terminology.
No conclusion was reached.
The Secretary records only that Van Steyn eventually produced three diagrams on the reverse of the wine list, none of which persuaded anyone.
Objects on View
- A seventeenth-century estate plan showing a formal knot garden whose maze had been inked over in 1731.
- A brass gardener’s measuring chain.
- An ivory-handled pruning knife.
- A tiny lead figurine recovered during excavations at a lost Warwickshire maze, displayed beside the excavation notes reading:
“Purpose unknown. Possibly pilgrim. Possibly child. Possibly neither.”
Members admired the honesty.
Refreshments
- Elderflower champagne.
- Tiny cheese gougères.
- Smoked trout pâté on rye.
- Roast quail with tarragon.
- Beaune Premier Cru 2018.
Dessert consisted of individual pistachio cakes decorated with miniature icing hedge patterns.
Max observed that his had “only one route to the centre.”
Nobody laughed.
Other Business
The Secretary noted that The Silence of Shadows: A Comparative Study of Umbra in Netherlandish Still Life has now been postponed for the sixth consecutive meeting.
Without discussion, members agreed to postpone it again.
Instead, October’s selection will be:
Dust Jackets Removed: Private Library Rebinding in Edwardian Surrey
by Beatrice Ainsworth.
Adjournment
Meeting concluded at 11:41 p.m.
As members collected their coats, Molyneux remarked that every year the Groupette seemed to drift further from literature and closer to “a support group for people with a love of highly specialised footnotes.”
Pascal stretched, yawned magnificently, walked once around the room for reasons known only to himself, and returned to precisely the spot from which he had begun. Fiona d’Abernon observed that this was, perhaps, the evening’s only true labyrinth.