Printable maze · Themes
Nature maze
A maze carved into the shape of a leaf, 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 Nature
A leaf is a solar panel with plumbing. Veins carry water up from the roots and sugars back out, and the pattern they make tends to run in families: maples, oaks, and elms branch in a net, while grasses and lilies run their veins in parallel lines. In autumn, shortening days shut down chlorophyll production, and the yellows and oranges already present in the leaf finally show through. The red in maples is different: it is pigment the tree makes fresh as the leaf shuts down.
Why a leaf
The silhouette is a broad lobed leaf with a notched edge and a stem at the base, the outline a deciduous tree drops by the thousand each fall. Because the corridors follow the leaf's own branching veins, this nature maze reads the way a real blade of leaf tissue does, with paths splitting off a central midrib.
Teachers and parents reach for it during a fall leaf unit or a walk that ends with a pocketful of specimens.
What is in this maze
A 10 by 10 maze cut into the shape of a leaf, with a single route of 31 steps and 17 turns from start to finish.
| Size | Grid | Shortest route | Turns |
|---|---|---|---|
| easy | 10 x 10 | 31 steps | 17 |
| medium | 16 x 16 | 77 steps | 52 |
| hard | 24 x 24 | 134 steps | 76 |
How to solve a Nature 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 leaf silhouette is solid wall, so a corridor running along the edge of the shape has nowhere to branch and can be followed at speed.