A little patch of magic has returned to Toronto Island.

The Toronto Islands labyrinth, a twisting, Alice in Wonderland-like hedge maze first built in 1967, was ripped up by city parks staff in 2011 after years of disrepair and lack of sunlight due to towering 15-metre-tall Japanese zelkova trees nearby.

However, a $200,000 donation from William Meany, a businessman who fell in love with the labyrinth as a boy, encouraged local politicians to get behind the idea of reconstruction. City council accepted Meany’s offer last July and awarded him naming rights (he went with “The William Meany Maze”), getting the ball rolling on the maze’s return.

And so, over the course of a few days in late May and early June, hundreds of volunteers, from Boy Scouts to island residents, worked to bring the lost labyrinth on Centre Island back to life.

About 1,200 black cedars were shipped from an Ontario tree nursery and planted in a network of hallways and dead-ends about 10 metres from the original location, just south of the Centreville amusement park. A crew then scattered a carpet of mulch through the passages.

“I hadn’t been to Toronto Island since I was little,” said Becky Lindsey, 25, who volunteered alongside 85 coworkers from Labatt Breweries. “We were working our way through the maze as we were mulching … It seems like a good spot to hang out during the summer.”

For now, chain-link fences outline the maze walls and block out the public. The fencing will remain on site all year, allowing the 4- to 6-foot cedars to grow into dense, leafy walls.

“The trees need this time to have their roots knit,” explained parks manager Rob Richardson. “We want to make sure we’re fertilizing and it has proper irrigation, proper watering so the trees have a good chance to establish themselves.”

Park staff will be responsible for maintaining the maze, a task estimated to cost $15,000 a year once the maze grows to full size. The process involves pruning and shearing the tops and sides of the hedges to keep the maze’s shape.

An antique bell from Island Public School, the island’s first schoolhouse, will rest atop a pole in the maze’s centre. The schoolhouse was opened in 1888 and mysteriously burned to the ground the night of May 24, 1909.

“The bell was recovered from the fire, blackened but still useable,” explained William Meany over email. “It will sit atop a carved sculpture made by a young man who grew up on the island and attended school there — Tyler Ganton — who is carving a pole to support the bell from an old island tree that came down in this year’s ice storm.”

The bell will ring again on Victoria Day of 2015, exactly 106 years to the day that the schoolhouse was incinerated.

“After that, every kid in Toronto that makes it to the centre of the maze will get to ring it too,” Meany said.

The maze’s original blueprints were used in the restoration. It was mapped out by Peter Vanderwerf, a Dutch landscape designer who immigrated to Canada in 1948 and supported his six daughters by manicuring gardens for Toronto’s elite.

Vanderwerf died in 2009 at the age of 89, but his daughter, Tieneka Vanderwerf, was delighted to hear news of her father’s lasting legacy.

“He was very careful and taciturn man, it was a real compliment for him to be chosen to build it,” Vanderwerf said.

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It was a family tradition for the Vanderwerf clan to picnic at the maze each summer. Now, a new generation of Vanderwerfs can get lost inside their great-grandfather’s resurrected masterpiece.

“Now our children have children . . . it will be their first time seeing it this year,” she said.