Hyperfixed - The Master of Mazes vs The Big Green Monster

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

Three years ago, Becca was seeing double. Her hometown's hedge maze had an uncanny resemblance to a famous maze in England, but no one seemed to realize it except her. So Becca wants to know if the maze is, indeed, a copy. And if she's right, she wants credit where credit is due.LINKS:- Adrian Fisher's book: The Amazing Book of Mazes- Henry Eliot's book: Follow This Thread- Honey Pot Hill Orchards in Stow We are doing a LIVE SHOW in Brooklyn in September, get your tickets herehttp://tickets.hyperfixedpod.com/Please consider becoming a hyperfixed premium member. Your support keeps our show alive.https://www.hyperfixedpod.com/join Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

P-st, didn't hear this from me, but Normal Gossip is back for season 10, All-Stars. Join Rachel Hampton as she shares incredibly chaotic gossip from the real world. They're bringing back some all-time favorite guests, alongside several new friends that people have been requesting for years. They've also got a brand-new theme song, courtesy of Radiotopia's own Rishikesh Hereway. And to share another secret, Normal Gossip is doing video this season. You can listen to normal gossip on all of your favorite podcast platforms like usual, or you can come watch Jaws Drop on YouTube. New episodes out every Wednesday all summer long. Hey, everyone, this is Alex.

I just wanted to ask you to please consider becoming a premium member of Hyperfixed. It's $8 a month or $59 a year, and you'll get bonus episodes, access to our Discord, discounts on merch, discounts on live shows. But the real reason that I'm asking you is because it's our goal to get to $45.5. subscribers by the end of the year so that I can provide my coworkers with both raises and health care. We're currently at 3,600, so we only have 900 to go. If you want to become a member, please go to hyperfixpod.com slash join, or you can join directly through the Apple Podcast app. There's a little subscribe button right at the top. Also, just a reminder that we're doing a live show in September at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn.

Tickets are available at Tickets.hyperfixpod.com, but they're going fast, so get them well you can. All right, that's it. Spielover, here's the show. Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, and this is hyperfixed. Each week on our show, listeners write in with their problems big and small, and I solve them. Or at least I try. And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't. This week, the Master of Mases versus the Big Green Monster.

Hey, Becca, how you doing? Oh, man, I'm in a full sweat. This is Becca. She's a landscape designer, and she's from a tiny town called Stowe, Massachusetts. And these two details are actually very important. Because the reason Becca reached out to us had to do with this obligation she feels to write a wrong in the world that no one else seems to have noticed and could only have been noticed by someone with her specific background.

So let's get into it. The story of this discovery began three years ago, when Becca was in her last year of grad school, studying landscape architecture. I remember I was in like a regional planning class and the department had mentioned that there was a woman in the community looking for help designing a hedge maze

for her property and there weren't any takers except for me. I was like, this is right up my alley. It's kind of obscure. Of course, Becca had never actually designed a hedge maze, but she'd been in one tons of times. Because Stowe, Massachusetts, the tiny town that Becca grew up in,

happens to be home to one of the largest and most formidable hedge mazes in the United States. It's called the Big Green Monster. And if you're picturing that massive maze from the end of the Shining, you're not super far off. The Big Green Monster has eight-foot hedges and 1.5 miles of pathway.

But the thing that's really special about the monster is its diabolical design. Unlike most mazes, which are full of straight lines, and sharp corners that sort of zigzag their way towards some kind of ultimate goal. The big green monster has these giant swirling spiraled hedges that make you think you're progressing toward the goal when in reality one wrong turn can send you looping endlessly in the wrong direction, which honestly sounds like kind of a nightmare to me.

Oh, it's so fun. And I think what I really like about it is the camaraderie that you get. Because like nobody's going in there and banging it out the first time. Like, that's impossible. But when you're in there and you keep bumping into people and you're like so overwhelmed. And then you make it out and it's like, I don't know, it's just that sense of accomplishment is really fun. So Becca was really excited about the prospect of designing her own hedge maze. And she wanted to do it right.

So when she got this gig, she turned to the masters of the craft for inspiration. And when you Google Master of Hedgemases, there is one name that will always come up first. because this guy is literally called the master of hedge mazes. His name is Adrian Fisher, and he's the most famous hedge maze designer in England. Like, I think one of his hedge maces made it on to, like, one of their dollar bills or something. Like, big time. Wow. Yeah.

Can you imagine being so celebrated? I can only dream. So here's Becca. She's at school, in a studio space. she's reading about Adrian Fisher and she's studying these photos of different mazes that he's designed. And then suddenly, one of the photos

stops her dead in her tracks. I said, wait a minute, I feel like I've seen this before. Unlike most mazes, which are full of straight lines and sharp corners that sort of zigzag their way towards some kind of ultimate goal, the maze in the photo had these giant swirling, spiraled hedges that make you think you're progressing toward the goal,

when in reality, one wrong turn could send you looping endlessly in the wrong direction. Just like the big green monster in Stowe, Massachusetts. Except that this wasn't the big green monster. According to the website, the maze in the photo was on some historic estate in England called the Longleet House. So Becca pulls up a photo of the Big Green Monster maze and places it next to the photo of the Longleet maze.

And when she looks at them side by side, they appear to be identical. Which brings Becca to the conclusion. My hometown hedge maze is a direct rip-off from one of the most famous ones abroad. For a landscape designer like Becca, this felt like a big deal. It's like that moment in the movie Bring It On, where Kirsten Dunst realizes the award-winning cheerleading squad, the Rancho Carnet Toro stole their routine from the East Comden Clovers. But I wanted to know if it would have the same visceral impact on a layman like me.

So Becca sent me a side-by-side comparison of the two hedgemen. And to my admittedly untrained eyes, the resemblance was startling. Oh, my God. I mean, everything from the stand to the spirals to like the little sort of junction points of all the spirals, which have like a little sort of circular shrub right in the middle. Like they are one to one. It really does look exactly the same. I think it's a dead on copy. It's maybe mirrored tops to match the topography.

Have you told anybody from home about it? Yes. Once I found out, it was like something came over me. It felt like this was something that was so in my lane and like perfectly aligned with my interests that I was like, I have to tell everybody. So I told like my parents and they said, okay, crazy, not a big deal. and then I've told friends and, like, showed side to side pictures, and they're like, yeah, that's crazy. And that's it. And they just kind of move on. It's been like, oh, what the hell? And then what are you going to do about it? Like, who cares? But for some reason, it feels very important to me.

Can you elaborate on that? Why does it feel important to you? I just think that with, like, having a better understanding of the amount of thought that goes into the design, of the maze because it's not just like, let me just draw a squiggle and we'll fill it in and there's your maze, especially with Adrian Fisher. He put so much care and attention into imagining how somebody is going to move through that space. So there's something about that process. When you just copy it, it feels like it's a disservice to like the amount of time he put in to making that original design. I don't know. It feels like stolen valor, stolen hedge maze valor. I don't know. Okay. I mean, I actually understand that completely, but I'm curious, you know, what would a

solution look like to you? So the big green monster maze is at this local apple orchard called Honeypot Hill, and I think I just want them to admit that they copied this design. I'm pretty sure that they did copy it. But the questions I also have are, if they did copy it, why did they copy that one, how did they copy it? Was it a convenience thing where they just found, they like Googled Hedgemase and just picked one and went for it? I want them to tell us how they did it if they did it. But the big thing I want is just some kind of acknowledgement if they copied it or not. That sounds extremely reasonable. Thanks so much for taking the time, Becca.

We're going to see what we can do. There's a world in which this could have been a two-step problem. We could have gone straight from our conversation with Becca to a conversation with the folks at Honeypot Hill. And if they had said, yeah, we copied the design and were willing to attribute it to Adrian Fisher, we probably would have called it a day. But if things had gone that way,

we would have inadvertently created a bigger problem than the one we set out to solve. And the only reason things didn't go that way, is because we were actually worried about an entirely different problem altogether. You see, even though we understood that copying the design of a hedge maze could constitute some kind of ethical violation, we had no idea if it might also constitute some kind of legal violation, maybe even a copyright violation. And obviously, that was a real concern to us. Because we didn't want to ask this small town apple orchard to go on the record, admitting that they'd

copied this design, if doing so might get them sued out of existence. So before we did anything else, we decided to find out if there was any tangible legal risk to admitting that this maze had been copied. Because the Longleap maze is in the UK, the laws that protected are UK laws. So after our interview with Becca, we reached out to five different UK attorneys, two copyright attorneys, two academics that specialize in copyright law, and one general counsel. And we asked them, can you copyright a hedge maze? And they gave us a bunch of different answers, ranging from likely yes to almost definitely no,

to one guy who told us that he'd never even considered the possibility that a maze could be copyrighted, but he was clearly very tickled by the idea. The one thing everyone seemed to agree on is that there's no definitive answer to this question. Because as far as any of them were aware, nobody has actually tested this question in a court of law. And although that doesn't mean that Honeypot Hill

is totally off the hook, it does dramatically reduce the risk of legal action, because it can be very expensive to bring a copyright case to court, like hundreds of thousands of dollars expensive. And when you don't have precedent on your side, those costs can become so outrageous, it's often not even worth the effort. Especially, I imagine, when the would-be defendant is a small-town apple orchard in another country. But there was one interesting thing that came up in these conversations, and this was the thing that ultimately dictated the course of the rest of our journey. The thing that we learned

is that when it comes to the question of creative authorship, UK laws are much more protective than U.S. laws and in ways that have nothing to do with money. For one thing, the UK recognizes the moral right of the creator to have their work attributed to them, which, as you already know, is what we were trying to do here.

But on the flip side of that, they also recognize something called the right against false attribution, which protects people from being credited for work they did not create. And this was something that we wanted to pay attention to. Because one of the reasons that this right exists is to prevent people from capitalizing on the name and reputation of famous creators.

And in the world of hedge mazes, there is no one more famous than Adrian Fisher. So we decided that regardless of where things currently stand with this question of copyright and hedge mazes, if we were planning to ask Honeypot Hill to credit Adrian Fisher, then we should make sure that Adrian Fisher's cool with being credited. But almost immediately, I began to worry if we'd made the right call. Because when we asked Adrian to introduce himself, this is what he said. I am widely acknowledged as the world's leading designer of mazes of all kinds around the world. I've created over 700 in 43 countries.

And every single thing I do will be something uniquely creative in this world of remorseless mass production. anything less would just be picking up a pizza hut and plonking it down on every street corner regardless of climate, culture, or anything. This, of course, is Adrian Fisher. And believe it or not, in this moment, I had not yet told him that we were going to be discussing a copycat maze. In fact, when we started this interview, he specifically said that he didn't want us to tell him what it was about. Because a big part of Adrian's philosophy on life stems from the singular delight that comes from surprises. He loves fun and play and curiosity and cultivating those things in other people

is one of the engines behind his designs. But we were beginning to doubt if this particular surprise would yield much fun for the master of mazes. Because while we began inching our way toward our ultimate question, Adrian seized on every available opportunity to tell us why copying a hedge maze

is antithetical to its purpose for existing. If people want to create a maze, all I do is urge them to use their own imaginations and find themselves. I don't want them to slavishly design me. I've got no interest in copying them. What on earth would we be doing if we didn't joyfully celebrate the wonderful diversity so that when you go to a particular garden or particular landscape or particular city,

it is the only place in the world, which is quite like that. So, as you can imagine, I was not in any hurry to tell him about the big green monster. But after about 40 minutes of beating around the bush, I had to make a decision. either abandoned ship or forge ahead with the quest, shit or get off the pot. And I knew he was probably going to get mad, and that I was probably going to be the target of his first wave of fury, but I decided to rip the Band-Aid off and tell him about the copycat maze.

And thank God I did, because when we showed Adrian a photo of the Big Green Monster, he said this. That's not my design. It's not. No, no, that was designed by Greg Price in 1975. I thought that it was one of your designs. No, not that one.

But you recognize the design right away. Yeah, it's quite unmistakably a copy of the one at Longlead. But Greg Bright design. Remember when I said that if we'd gone straight to Honeypot Hill, we would have created a bigger problem than the one we'd set out to solve? This is what I was talking about, because it turns out Adrian did not design the Longlead Hedgemase. So, why did it?

Becca think he did? There are actually a number of reasons why this might have happened. It could be the fact that when you run a Google image search for Adrian Fisher hedge maze, the Longleet maze comes up twice. It could also be that despite Adrian's hemming and hawing about the sanctity of maze designs, he chose to publish a hand-drawn blueprint of the Longleet maze in his 2006 book, The Amazing Book of Mases. To us, however, the most compelling reason may be tied up in the story of the Longleat maze itself, which is tied up in the story of its designer, Greg Bright. In the 1970s, Greg Bright was described as the maze king.

This is Henry Elliott. He's a writer and editor, and he wrote an exceptionally good book about mazes called Follow This Thread. And one of the stories he tells in the book is about how before Adrian Fisher became known as the master of mazes, there was this other young designer named Greg Bray, who the newspapers dubbed as the maze king. And there's something strangely cosmic

about the fact that a Greg Bright design was accidentally attributed to Adrian Fisher. Because in the world of maze making and the philosophies that underpin them, these two men sit on opposite ends of the spectrum. While Adrian's designs are focused on the cultivation of fun and play and curiosity, Greg was interested in an entirely different kind of

visitor experience. He fantasized about this sort of death maze where you have a door locked behind you and if you didn't get out, you'd starve to death. And there was something quite sort of uncompromising about his attitude towards mazes. It wasn't that Greg wanted people to die in his mazes. But for him, mazes weren't about fun. They were a metaphor for life. When you enter a maze, you should have to make difficult decisions to choose between different

paths that may lead to discomfort or endless wandering or even failing. or even failure, so that when you inevitably emerged, it would be a kind of rebirth. To this end, Greg developed three distinct formal elements that nobody had ever seen before. The first of those, he called mutually accessible sensors. What these did was divide the maze into interconnected sections that would allow you to get close to the end of the maze until one wrong turn would send you immediately back to the beginning. The second device he invented was,

what he called his partial valves. And these are the most distinctive element of his mazes. Partial valves are those giant swirling paths that curl onto each other, creating this extremely disorienting experience that also makes it very hard to retrace your steps. But Greg's third contribution was probably his most significant. The third element he added were covered bridges, which, shockingly, had never been used in maze design. He literally added a new dimension.

One of the problems with maze design is if you're on just two dimensions, you quite quickly box yourself into corners. But if you've got bridges, it releases you to send people wherever you want them and you can cut them over the top of the right path and send them in all sorts of other ways. So when Greg got hired to make Longleet maze in 1975, he applied all three of these elements to his design. And when the hedges grew and the maze finally opened to the public in 1978, it became an instant, critical success. The maze was a marvel of design and people from all over the place flocked to visit. In the Long Leap Maze, Greg proved that hedge mazes could be a successful commercial enterprise. And as a result of that success, Greg became something of a cultural commodity. He had a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in central London with his maze designs.

I think Disney and Japan were in touch with him about building a big new maze theme park, and he published several books of his mazes. But soon, Soon after Longleet opened to the public, visitors began to complain about the maze. It was anxiety-inducing and kind of scary. And people were getting lost for way longer than they anticipated, which of course was exactly the way that Greg intended it to be. But that wasn't good for business. So the owner of Longleet decided that he wanted Greg to change the maze

to adjust the design and make it more fun and family-friendly. But by 1979, Greg was nowhere to be found. At the height of his popularity, he'd suddenly withdrawn from society, and he was never heard from again. So who do you call to make a maze more fun and family-friendly? Without wishing to be provocative and controversial, I happen to believe that the family is the most important unit in the world. Adrian Fisher was brought in to make it simpler. Adrian took the covers off the bridges so that visitors could use the vantage point to orient themselves in the maze. And he built a quick exit route

so that once visitors got to the center of the maze, they could get out easily without having to navigate the whole thing in reverse. I suppose by now it's a bit of a collaboration. It's got that kind of intense formal difficulty from Greg and the kind of family-friendly aspect that Adrian has introduced. And this is perhaps the most compelling explanation for why Becca might have thought that the Longleap maze was designed by Adrian Fisher.

Because parts of it were, in fact, designed by him, even if he isn't excited about the idea of claiming ownership over them. Now, I know this has already been a pretty long and convoluted journey. But before confronting Honeypot Hill, our goal was to find out if the designer of Longleap Maze was cool with the idea of being acknowledged as the inspiration for the Big Green Monster. And since Greg has chosen to leave society, we knew we would never be able to ask him. The closest thing we could hope for was someone who had talked to Greg. And this is actually the reason we reached out to Henry.

Because in the process of researching his book, Henry actually found Greg. We're going to save the story of that journey for our next bonus episode. But for the purposes of this story, the thing that's important to know is that when Henry asked Greg why he became a recluse, one of the chief reasons was all of the unwanted attention that being the Maze King had brought to him.

He didn't like the spotlight. He didn't like the fame. And we wondered if that might also mean that he wouldn't like to receive the credit that Becca thought he deserved. So we put the question to Henry. And with the obvious caveat that he can't really answer for Greg and only met him very briefly,

Henry said this. So in terms of this particular situation, I feel like, as long as it's not kind of impinging on his time or sort of attention, I'm sure in principle he'd be happy to be acknowledged. After the break, one more turn in this maze of a story. Hey, it's Alex.

So some of you might know that before I was doing hyperfixed, I was at Reply All. And one of the people I used to co-host with was Emmanuel Jocci, who is just an amazing reporter, really knows how to find the story inside the story. And now Emmanuel has a new show that I am excited to tell you. you about. It's called Big Lives, and he hosts it with Kai Wright, another award-winning journalist. And together they dig into the BBC's archive to tell the real, complicated, surprising stories behind icons who shaped our culture. We're talking David Bowie, Tina Turner, Richard Pryor, Jane Fonda, people that you think you know. But, you know, that's kind of the whole point of the show.

You don't actually know them. Not the full picture. The show's smart. It goes deep, and it has a lot of heart, which if you know Emmanuel's work, will come as no surprise to you at all. Again, the show is called Big Lives. It's from Pushkin and BBC Studios. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the show.

So before the break, we took a very long and circuitous journey, and we still hadn't made any progress toward our goal, which honestly, for a story about mazes, felt pretty appropriate. But now it was time to get down to business. We were going to have to contact the owners of Honeypot Hill and confront them about their hedge maze.

It was the moment we'd all been waiting for, the moment of truth. And in that moment, I conveniently got pulled into another interview. So I sent hyperfix producer Amor Yates to confront them instead. So, Amor, how did it go? Oof. Oh, no. Just kidding. It went great.

Dude, don't do that to me. What happened? Okay, so hold on. I wrote myself a little script here. Are you recording Alex? Yep. Okay. So the people who run Honeypot Hill are a father and daughter team named Andrew and Chelsea.

And they could not be more lovely. It's very nice to meet you in person, Chelsea. It's very nice to meet you, Andrew. Do we take hands? Do you guys have any questions before we get formally into the interview? Do you have any questions? Nope. Fire away.

So Honeypot Hill Orchard has been in their family for a hundred years. They were both raised on the farm doing farm kind of stuff, and neither of them have had any ambitions on doing anything else. It's like farm life all day, every day. But Chelsea told me that for as long as she can remember, her dad has been really into building things. She remembers him building, like, this doll house when she was a kid and, like, built her blocks and all kinds of other toys. Like, he's just a really crafty dude. And so one day, in the 80s, Andrew sees this article in the Wall Street Journal about these mazes that were all the rage in Japan.

They're built with these like eight foot tall, slatted walls that were movable and adjustable, so you can change them on a whim. And Andrew was really intrigued by this. He thinks it's incredibly cool. And he decides to actually build one in the attic of the barn. Not only was it cool, it was also a blast to make it. Like Andrew loved making this thing.

He'd never, he didn't go to school for a lot of, this, he'd never done it before, he didn't watch any tutorials, he just decided he wanted to make the thing, he made it, and it was really fun and he enjoyed it. So after that, Andrew's like bitten by the maze bug. So he builds another maze for his kids, except this one is on the farm, and he opens it to the public. And it's a huge success. So he builds another maze, and it's a huge success. So he decides to build another maze, except this time he wants to try something even bigger and cooler. And that's when he finds the design for the Longleat Hedge maze.

These are pre-Internet days. And Andrew is not a big computer guy. Part of the reason why you're hearing me tell this story instead of them is because some of that audio was a little rough and it's actually kind of hard to hear in the recording. So where did Andrew find this design for the Longleet maze if not the Internet? In a book? And who do we know that put out a physical book that it? included the design for Long Leap maze.

Adrian Fisher. That's right. So Andrew takes this book to a local photocopy shop, and he asked them to blow up the maze real, real big, so he can look at it real, real good. And then using that giant photocopy as a blueprint, he begins laying out the plants by hand. And I'm talking like hundreds, maybe thousands of plants. And over the next six or seven years, he tends to it as it grows into the big green monster that we know today.

I'm not sure I knew exactly what I was getting into when I started the whole thing, but it just seemed like a fun thing to do. And, you know, that's part of our job is our life. And you've got to have a little bit of fun on your job if it's going to be your life. So that's part of how it evolved, I guess you could say. For Andrew, this whole thing of crediting. the creator, like, hadn't really occurred to him, probably for the same reason that, like, this copyright question has been soap in the air for so many of the people we've talked to. And it also might be why so many of Becca's friends were kind of blaze and whatever about her

discovery. It's just one of those things where I think that for people outside of this world, it's hard to see how much personal intention and philosophy actually goes into the design of a hedge maze. I mean, that makes perfect sense to me. But now that you have brought this to their attention, are they going to attribute the design to Greg? Yeah. Sure. Yeah. That's not a problem.

I think that's kind of cool. Oh, my God. That's amazing. I can't believe we pulled this one off. This one felt like a dead end to me. May's pun intended. So is it time for us to follow up with Becca? Yeah.

Let's do it. A couple weeks later, we scheduled a follow-up conversation with Becca and told her everything we'd learned about the creation of the Longleet Mays, about Greg Bright and Adrian Fisher and about how this design ended up on an apple orchard in Stowe, Massachusetts. And then I pulled up a photo on my computer and shared my screen with Becca. Do you see what I'm sharing on my screen? Oh, my God. Amazing. Oh, my God. This is beyond what I ever imagined. The photo on the screen was a simple image of a sign, with blue lettering against a white backdrop.

It was staked into the ground at the Honeypot Hill Apple Orchard. And it said, the big green monster maze, inspired by the long-leet hedge maze designed by Greg Bray. This is amazing. Holy cow. Holy shit. Oh, my God. I'm wondering how you feel about the path that this has taken and your role in it. I feel amazing.

This is like, I can't believe a lot of things. But I really love hearing that what's his name? name Andrew, the owner. I love hearing that he has this interest in tinkering and building and wants to do this and credit it and like appreciate the like artistry behind it. I love that you went big and we're like if we're going to do this, we're going to do it right and we're going to copy the maze that people have to get evacuated out of because they like can't do it. That's awesome. Oh my God. I can't believe it. Thank you guys so much.

This has been amazing. Amazing, amazing. Thank you so much for your help. We'll have links to photos of both mazes, as well as the brand new Honeypot Hills, designed by Greg Bright Sign in our show notes. This episode of Hyperfix was produced by Emma Cortland, Amor Yates, and Kat Shookneck.

The music is by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and me. The show was engineered by Tony Williams. Special thanks this week to Laura Trappnell, André Guadamuz, Anna Blessed, John Stickland, and Lionel Bentley. You can get bonus episodes, join our Discord, get merch, and live show discounts by becoming a premium member at hyperfixpod.com slash join. That's hyperfixedpod.com slash join. And on the subject of live show discounts, our live show is on September 11th in downtown Brooklyn, and it is going to be very fun. Get your tickets at tickets.hyperfixpod.com or become a member and get 10% off.

Hyperfix is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover Audio with Vision at Radiotopia.fm. Thanks so much for listening. RadioTopia.