Improvements to outside are on-going.

These photos show the old terrace and the new pergola and tiled terrace. The tiling and pergola also run along the side of the maison, and hopefully this time next year there will be sufficient climbing plants to make the "extension" of the living room look more lived in. The problem with gardening here, apart from the fact you need a pickaxe and not a trowel, is the fact that many plants I would have liked to have grown do not survive the quite severe frosts we have here in the winter. I had no idea it would be so COLD. One of my dreams was to grow Bougainvillea which is fine in the summer but dies of shock in the winter. Still I did manage a few flowers last summer and I will try again in the spring.

We have recently bought a few trees which should help but garden centres here in France are not cheap and I have to choose my plants carefully in order to get best value for money. The "compost" they sell here is absolute rubbish and expensive rubbish at that, so we have bought a compost bin which hopefully will give us some decent stuff. I started filling it up and would you believe it the wind blew the whole bin right across the garden, so now we have to secure it with stones to stop it blowing away again.