Nor could anyone but the baron, his wife, Marion, and their daughter, Sabina, keep their bearings once within the labyrinth of its depths. More than one visitor had declared themselves altogether lost and unable to find the direction toward the house again until rescued by their host.

A disconcerting adventure, somewhere between the prized dawn redwood the baron’s uncle had brought back from China and the arbor of dwarfed flowering plums sixty feet up the eastern slope, had caused one bewildered visitor later to insist that the baron change the name on the stone archway leading from the courtyard above down into the botanical depths below, to Geheimnisgarten, or Mysterious Garden.

“My garden does indeed contain many mysteries,” the baron had laughed with great delight, “but not of the kind to which you refer. No, I think it shall remain the Garden of Spring and I will let those so inclined discover its deeper mysteries for themselves.”

Had one been able to see across the entirety of the garden in any single direction, keeping one’s bearings might have been tolerably possible. As the baron had designed it, however, his walkways and miniature courtyards and arbors and diminutive gardens within the larger garden—indeed every component of the whole—were surrounded by hedges a full two meters high. Only a giant could see over them. He desired to maintain an enclosed sense of privacy and singularity of botanical focus whatever one’s horticultural tastes. This he had certainly achieved, bewildering and losing many guests in the process. The slope down the hill from the house, facing south as it did, maximized available light the year round, allowing the baron to grow even a handful of tropical species.

From the courtyard at the rear of the manor house, the large garden opened and, from under the great stone arch, spread all the way down the slope, crossing the stream at the bottom of the valley, the windings of which the baron had made extensive use of by contriving a number of miniature falls and tiny lakes, birdbaths and fishponds, until it left the garden at its western corner to continue its journey across the plain.

From a vantage point on the courtyard above, or better yet, from high atop the rooftop balcony—to which the baron often first took guests to offer them an aerial visual tour before plunging into the depths of the place—it was possible to send one’s eyes scanning over the hedge tops and theoretically achieve a mental lay of the intricacies of the garden’s complex plotting scheme. Once on the level of the earth, however, and surrounded by a hundred twists and turns of the high-growing, vision-limiting fences, any prior sense of navigational equilibrium vanished altogether.

On this day, Baron von Dortmann found his daughter where he often found her, at the very heart of Der Frühlingsgarten: in the rose garden itself.