Perri Haughwout’s decision to build a labyrinth in her front yard wasn’t rushed. She had been thinking about it for years, much like one walks a labyrinth: deliberately but slowly, in quiet consideration, allowing things to unfold.
Haughwout would look out on her front lawn with distaste, imagining something more thoughtful in its place. In time, she let the weed-stricken lawn die entirely. Then two long years passed. By chance, in October 2023 she struck up a conversation with a local acquaintance named Tim Farley, who had been designing and planting gardens for a quarter of a century — but had never built a labyrinth. Both were now excited about the project, though still not hurried.
It took another year to design and build and plant. Finally, there it was: A meandering path that embodies its own circuitous road to existence. To Haughwout, a winemaker and beekeeper, and her husband Carmen Castaldi, who recently retired as president of Healdsburg’s Rodney Strong Vineyards, the garden’s long road to realization reinforces its call to contemplation, meditation and patience.
A labyrinth represents a way of looking both inward and outward, explains Haughwout, a way of bringing everything together, especially the natural world. One local example that spoke to the couple and helped set the project in motion is a grassy spiral on the Sonoma Coast along the Kortum Trail, near Shell Beach. It’s believed to have been there for over 20 years.
“People are just planting all their intentions there, and memories of people, and personal statements,” Castaldi says. “Little rocks, too. It’s very cool.”
Haughwout was immediately drawn to labyrinths as a personal tool. “I’m not one to sit still, so a way for me to center myself and focus has been walking meditation,” she says. “The walking, the purposeful walking, was what really attracted me to have this at my own house. I mentioned to my neighbors, ‘If you see me walking around in circles, you’ll know I’m just meditating, and not that crazy old lady next door, right?’”
The couple’s new labyrinth is not, in fact, a true circle. Instead, it meanders left and right, winding its way around an existing concrete path that leads to the front door. And this serpentine footprint is artfully echoed in the design of the low, mounded “walls” that define it. Farley chose to construct them of flat, slate-like slabs of locally quarried Sonoma fieldstone. The stones are placed vertically into the earth and aligned perpendicular to the flow of the lava-rock path, so each stone points to the center of the labyrinth.
The effect is something lifelike and familiar, yet mythical. In the spaces between the stones, Farley has planted a crevice garden that Haughwout and Castaldi figure will be a perennial work-in-progress, where succulents and groundcovers and other small plants can put down roots and send up flowers and spread over the rock, softening the already gentle walls while bearing the promise of constant change.
“It’s really going to grow,” Castaldi says. “What I like is that I continue to walk around it, and every time, there’s something else there. We just started placing different nuggets that we’ve collected over the years, like a shell from the beach” — or a rock from Sedona, Haughwout adds.
Another metaphorical layer is Farley’s own labor. He estimates he spent 160 hours last winter, five or six hours at a time, often on hands and knees, selecting and hammering each stone into place.
“In the garden, a lot of times we have tasks that are repetitive,” Farley says. “It’s all about the planning. Get the stone here, get the dirt here. Once I have all that in place, and I actually go into execution, it’s very repetitive. It doesn’t take 100% of your mind state — it absolutely has some of those meditative qualities.”
The labyrinth is adjacent to a Pinot Noir vineyard that supports Haughwout’s small label, Perri Jaye Vineyards, which produces about 150 cases of Pinot Noir and rosé each year. Once or twice a year, she invites a few dozen members of her wine club to her vineyard for an intimate gathering, with home cooking from Castaldi — and now a chance to walk the labyrinth and perhaps tuck their own small mementos into the stones.
Even as she asks guests and loved ones to bring their own remembrances, Haughwout feels a strong connection to the labyrinth.
“Walking is my way to meditate, and the labyrinth is pretty magical,” she says. “I feel like as soon as you walk in there, you just kind of go, ‘I’m here for a reason.’ And the reason is, you know, being here, being present and walking with intention.”
Resources
Landscape Design and Installation
Tim Farley
773-456-3813
unlo.com/gardens
