Modern Zulus would much prefer canvas tea tents

The last thing I ever seem to get round to looking at every year at the Chelsea Flower Show is flowers

Looking out of the window I can see it has stopped raining, dammit. I should have trusted my instincts, stuck to my guns and bought that African breeze hut. At a stroke it would have relieved me once and for all of a vague uneasy feeling that has been niggling me for some time – namely that my garden lacks a focal point, a conversation piece, a hub (or possibly a nub) that compels visitors to stop dead in their tracks, scratch their eyes and squeal: "Oh, how wonderful. Where on earth did you get that?" The African breeze hut would have served that end.

It was Kate who spotted it. We were at the Chelsea Flower Show buying the usual junk – self-clean patchwork gardening clogs, bird feeders made from recycled pizza boxes. We had just spent half an hour queuing to see the small garden design for fun-loving young executives – a hoot if you like straw and steel balls.

Now we were heading towards Prince Charles's famous meditation and medicine garden in search of a certain stress-and-bunion-healing nettle when Kate suddenly stopped dead, stretched her eyes and squealed: "Look at that!"

I've never been to a Zulu settlement but I'm sure they're awash with breeze huts – small open-sided wooden edifices like miniature band stands topped with a conical thatched roof like a straw hat. They were enchanting. I could put mine in that bit where I once tried unsuccessfully to make an Elizabethan knot garden. I would grow exotic climbing plants up the wooden posts with big brilliantly coloured flowers and hang scented candles in wicker holders (I've seen them in Homebase) from the roof and give elegant al fresco dinner parties. I could wear my kaftan and dish out salads from the hand-carved Masai bowl I bought when I went to Tanzania to dissuade my sister from becoming a missionary nun.

And then it started to rain and all the customers queuing to put in their orders for the various kinds of breeze hut – the Harare model with optional back cushions, the Savannah with colonial-style armchairs – began to look doubtful. Especially when the wind got up and torrents of horizontal rain lashed through the open sides of the exhibition hut. Maybe I needed something more weatherproof, suggested Kate, so we left the breeze huts and looked instead at metal gazebos painted to look like bamboo, which rotated to follow the sun and had removable windows in case it ever came out long enough to sunbathe.

The last thing I ever seem to get round to looking at every year at the Chelsea Flower Show is flowers. All those huge displays of specimen roses and rare orchids in the floral tents depress me because I'm hopeless at growing things. The Elizabethan knot garden was just one of my failures. Before that I tried growing vegetables inspired by The Lake Isle of Innisfree and the poet's modest ambition to have nine bean rows. I planted a dozen rows, to be on the safe side, and patiently watered and waited all through the spring dreaming of the simple contentment that I, too, should have before long with my beans and my bee-loud glade.

In my case it's more a bee-loud bedroom, because for some reason wild bees have taken to nesting under the tiles outside my bedroom window. As long as they stay outside it's fine, but one year they swarmed in my shoe cupboard and I had to get the pest control officer round to flush them out. I don't know what he sprayed the room with, much the same substance that B-52 bombers used, I suspect, because when I got home the bedroom looked as if it had been napalmed – dead bees everywhere.

Where was I? Ah yes, my bean rows. Fat chance. Not one single bean shoot sprouted and after a bit, because it was flat, the kids used my vegetable patch for pitch and putt. Now you see why I concentrate on the bricks and mortar of gardening rather than the plants which, fortunately, my mother in the granny annex tends to great effect.

In the end I didn't buy the breeze hut or the mock bamboo gazebo. I negotiated for a small white canvas marquee being used as a temporary tea tent. OK, half-price, they said, if you remove it by Friday, when the show closes.

It's not a breeze hut by any stretch of the imagination but, having since read the brochure and discovered that they're made in Congleton, Cheshire, I am less disappointed. I bet modern Zulus would rather have white canvas tea tents any day.