A-maize-ing

Love corn? Love a challenge? Then you have just a couple more days to find your true calling: two cornfield mazes in the Houston area.

Mazes themselves have been around for thousands of years, but plant-life labyrinths didn't really come into their own until the 16th century, when British nobility planted more and more complex hedge mazes at their castles. Planning and planting a hedge maze is an utterly foreign idea to Houstonist, who can kill any plant and couldn't find our way out of a paper bag. But the tradition continues today in a most American form, the cornfield maze, which we assume is what made James Earl Jones giggle in Field of Dreams.

The maze at Dewberry Farms, on Highway 362 north of Brookshire, is a giant billboard for Dewberry Farm, the home of "Texas Family Agri-Tainment" (if a corn maze doesn't qualify as Agri-Tainment, we don't know what does). In Angleton, the maze at Manna Fields is in the shape of Stephen F. Austin, the father of Texas. No kidding.

Torn over which maze to visit? Consider this: While Dewberry Farms advertises a pumpkin patch, Manna Fields has a pumpkin launcher. We can't resist the thought of finding our way through a corn version of one of Texas' early settlers while pumpkins arc gracefully overhead. Ah, life in the country.

Manna Fields: 1100 S. Walker in Angleton; open through Saturday
Texas Maze at Dewberry Farm: 7 miles north of Brookshire on Highway 362; open through Sunday