Home & Garden

As rising fuel prices compel potential long-distance vacationers to gaze not upon the highway but their own back yards, the question presents itself: What do you actually DO there?

Well, if your back yard is like most, there are places the sun shines where you'd rather it didn't, because whatever you do, you'd rather do it in the shade.

That's when a visit to any of a half-dozen or so big-box stores with a corner devoted to outdoor furniture could pay off. There you'll find umbrellas, as well as fabric-covered gazebos, which for the purposes of this article we'll say are like four-pole umbrellas.

The variety includes simple wood-and-cloth umbrellas with a six-foot span; you push the top half of the pole to open it up and secure it with a shiny chained pin. The fabric is a solid color — green, blue or khaki — and you can find them at Midtown Outlet in Anniston for $40 each.

At the other end of the range is the Martha Stewart Everyday Garden Collection's "Melrose" gazebo (Kmart, $370). Set on an off-hexagonal footprint, approximately 14 by 12 feet, it features full wrap-around mosquito netting, tempered glass countertops and nylon fabric panels on its perimeter.

Each of the six metal legs of the gazebo have screw holes for attaching it to a wooden deck.

Also no slouch is the gazebo department is Target, which has a dark bamboo-motif model in the "Madaga" line for $350 or, with a little less bulk and more decorative trim, the "Havenbury" for $300. Each is 10 feet square. Mosquito netting keeps the bugs away, which might well be attracted by the faux chandelier one can hang from the peak of the roof. Yes, really.

The potential gazebo buyer just needs to know that the shade doesn't pop out of the box — one has to work a little bit, including climbing a ladder — to achieve one's reward.

Target manager Jason Kellner said one

person can do the job by reading the directions in the box and allowing 11/2 to two hours of time.

They can be free-standing or anchored with screws into wooden decks, but despite a gazebo's four-posted stability, the cautious owner who knows a windy storm is coming might do well to detach the upper canopy from the main frame. However, this need can vary with the intensity of the storm; Kellner said he hasn't heard of any of his store's gazebos get blown down.

"They hold up real well to the weather," he said.

If there's a decorative drawback to

gazebos, it's that their color range isn't huge — dark earthen hues, such as greens, browns and khakis. Umbrellas are more varied in their hues, plus they bring the advantage of quick take-down if a storm looks imminent.

At any rate, umbrellas have sold well at Kohl's, where, according to salesman Keith Craft, "a lot of people are coming in and replacing their old wicker furniture [and saying] we need to get the umbrella, too."

Indeed, savvy manufacturers find that if they can get outdoor pieces to match, they might sell more; for example, at Kohl's, said Craft, there's outdoor dishware that matches the pattern in some of the umbrellas.

Plantation Patterns, an Alabama outdoor furniture company that sells its products through Marvin's, Wal-Mart and Home Depot, offers fabric in a floral pattern, green-and-blue stripes, khaki and dark brown; the company's umbrellas, cushions and pillows can be purchased to match.

Kohl's has beach umbrellas that open with a cord, but can still be lengthened to insert through the center hole of a table, on sale for $50.

This brings up another consideration for patio umbrellas — usage. Some umbrellas at the various retail stores we checked are exclusively for table usage. On the heavy side, with thick if durable fabric, they open with a crank and are designed to be set into a base for best appearance and stability.

At least one brand carries a caution on the box, "We strongly recommend you use the umbrella only with a patio table and with a heavy umbrella base."

These bases range in price from $20 to $40. The umbrellas range from $100 to $125.

A style called offset suspends the umbrella canopy from a spine that curves up from a heavy base and over the area that needs the shade. An example of this construction can be found at Lowe's for $377. The base comprises four individual boxes that hold water to provide the counterbalancing weight.

Lighter, often with classic wooden frames, are the umbrellas that push up to open, or are opened with a cord. They can be dropped through a table into a base, or set on their side if you're sitting on a blanket on the ground at the kids' soccer game.

And what if the party around the umbrella happens at night?

Well, Home Depot's Hampton Bay brand has you covered. In possibly the niftiest feature we saw on an umbrella, small but brilliant light-emitting diodes attached at the factory to the underside of the open canopy are powered by solar energy collected during the day.

A nine-foot by seven-foot rectangular umbrella, with 30 lights that burn for up to four hours on a charge, costs $119, while slightly smaller round umbrella with 24 lights that stay on three hours costs $99.