With plant labyrinths, the escape game is in the meadow

The green expanse stretches out to the edge of a tree barrier. Inside, the rustling of leaves accompanies the explorer, ready to get lost in the plant maze. At the start of the morning, the air is already charged with heat, the cicadas are chirping. Cap screwed on her head, backpack filled with a cold bottle, Magali came as soon as the opening, eager to get lost in this 2.5 hectare cornfield transformed into a giant labyrinth.

The social worker knows the place well, having already been there with her two children and her husband. But her enthusiasm remains intact. “I love it! I followed the progress of the shoot and then the development of the maze on social media. This year, it’s on the theme of insects.”she says, before plunging into the dense, opaque maze with Naël, a little boy in her care. “Do we take the right or the left? We’ll try that way, it’s not possible to be already lost…”

For three years, from the end of June to the end of October, Karine and Nicolas Tonnaire have been transforming a plot of their twenty-hectare farm into a mini-temporary leisure park. In their labyrinth Les Hautes Herbes, located in Entraigues-sur-la-Sorgue (Vaucluse), visitors will find no rides or sophisticated attractions, but the simple pleasure of going through the vegetation and finding their way by answering riddles, charades and other puzzles, scattered along the route. In 2023, more than four thousand visitors, two thirds of whom were from the region, played the role of voluntary lost souls for an hour and a half, the average time to find the exit.

Way to diversify

The farming couple is not the only one to have transformed their field of crops into a playground. Corn fields are sprouting up everywhere. The majority are managed by farmers, who have started alone or with the help of a franchise. Most see it as a way to diversify and provide their farm with new income or outlets.

In the spring of 2022, faced with the difficulties in the sector, Nicolas Tonnaire, 48, a market gardener for twenty years, decided to swap vegetable growing for cereals (wheat and barley), which was less random, but also to launch into agritourism. “To be able to continue in the profession, we had to find a solutionsays this farmer’s son. I had heard about the existence of many plant labyrinths on the Atlantic coast. In our area, there were none. Why not try?

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