In 1918 Dorothy Burnett (sister to Arthur, the 8th Laird of Kemnay) wrote a poem describing the perfect country garden that many city dwellers would have dreamed of at the end of the 1st World War.

The garden at Kemnay still has much in common with this description (including the rather haphazard planting scheme) so the verse continually comes to mind when pruning the roses, collecting the gooseberries or seeing the delphiniums bloom:

We shall have a garden with cherry trees in May;

The path shall be of flagstones and alternate all the way