Printable maze · Themes
Garden maze
A maze carved into the shape of a flower, at three sizes. Exactly one route runs from start to finish, so there is always an answer and never a shortcut.
Print the page above, or take the easy grid as a PDF. Both carry the answer key, and large print is a setting rather than a separate file.
Show the answer key
Print the page above, or take the medium grid as a PDF. Both carry the answer key, and large print is a setting rather than a separate file.
Show the answer key
Print the page above, or take the hard grid as a PDF. Both carry the answer key, and large print is a setting rather than a separate file.
Show the answer key
About Garden
A garden is ground deliberately enclosed and tended, and that enclosure is baked into the language: the English word paradise traces back to an Old Persian term for a walled park. Persian and Egyptian gardens were laid out around water channels and shade trees; later European estates clipped hedges into geometric patterns meant to be read from an upstairs window, which is where the hedge maze comes from. Flowers themselves are advertising, their petals, scent, and color evolved to bring pollinators to the pollen and nectar inside.
Why a flower
The silhouette is a single bloom: rounded petals radiating from a center, with a stem below. Petals pull the paths outward and back in the way real ones ring a flower's reproductive core, so every route through this garden maze eventually circles the middle.
Teachers running a spring plant unit and families waiting out a rainy afternoon in seed-starting season reach for this one.
What is in this maze
A 10 by 10 maze cut into the shape of a flower, with a single route of 24 steps and 17 turns from start to finish.
| Size | Grid | Shortest route | Turns |
|---|---|---|---|
| easy | 10 x 10 | 24 steps | 17 |
| medium | 16 x 16 | 78 steps | 50 |
| hard | 24 x 24 | 172 steps | 108 |
How to solve a Garden maze
Every maze here is perfect, which is a precise thing rather than a compliment: there are no loops and no islands, so exactly one route joins any two points. That has a useful consequence. Keep one hand on the wall and never take it off, and you will walk the whole maze and arrive at the exit. It always works on a perfect maze. It is also slow, because it walks you into every dead end on the way.
Filling dead ends is faster. Find any square with walls on three sides, shade it in, and treat it as solid. That usually creates a new dead end next to it, so keep going. When you run out, what is left unshaded is the route. On the easy grid that is a few minutes of work; on the hard one it is the whole puzzle, and it is how most people who solve mazes quickly actually do it.
Working backwards is the third trick, and it exploits how a maze is built. Passages branch far more often near the start than near the finish, so tracing from the exit means fewer wrong turns to reject. On a shaped maze the outline helps too: the flower silhouette is solid wall, so a corridor running along the edge of the shape has nowhere to branch and can be followed at speed.