Garden structures

Two features of our new garden that give me particular pleasure are the colourful gazebo and the veranda outside the kitchen door. Both structures are so sensible for British weather when it can be dry one minute and raining the next. I feel ridiculously pleased with myself when the rain is bucketing down on the glass roof and I am standing beneath it in the dry! Two of my citrus trees have been outside beneath the veranda all winter and are looking healthier than the ones crammed into the small conservatory. I think they have liked the fresh air without the wet. I draped them in fleece when it was frosty and no harm came to them. I brought a few tree peonies from the cottage and they are in temporary plastic pots under the veranda also and sufficiently happy there that I think I might buy some decorative pots to keep them in instead of planting out. They are the plants that I bought each year for my father's birthday. When the family home in North Yorkshire was sold I dug them up. Now I have moved them again. They are well travelled! Tree peonies are far more available now than formerly. The garden has meandering small gravel paths with shrubs at either side and some of the planting is sub-tropical. I'm hoping that at some point we'll get some weather to match!