Every morning I sit in the easy chair near daybreak and contemplate the cone shaped collection of shrubs that display their beauty before me in the morning light. This part of the garden I watch, widening in front and tapering two hundred yards to the rear, in fearsome symmetry, shows form and depth, color and beauty, shape and diversity in such harmony, that within the substance of the garden cone the thin meandering track of grass appears to fill the cone and separate the shrubs forming the walls of a cornucopia, brim with sunlight and wonder. Square, oblong, rounded, a medley of greens and bronze and reds, pruned to harmonize, and when seen from the height of my window, tapering down to the blue-grey harbour water. This is the only part of the garden that achieves this perfection and it only can be perceived from a height. Such is the nuance of perspective. To meditate with such an icon for an old man has perhaps become like reconnecting to a Child's Garden of Verses or Listen to your Garden, or connecting once again with Robert Louis Stevenson as he, confined to his room for his last years, looked out his window and found his symmetry.
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