Record-Breaking Temperatures, Top Tips For Protecting Plants In A Heatwave & Where Are Those Veronica Plugs?

Hello, it's Friday 26 June 2026.

Well it's pretty much the end of the current heatwave and I'm flagging a bit, unlike the plants which are doing just fine. UK temperature records have been broken (again) and there's no sign of rain for the next ten days, which is not good. The hens are doing absolutely fine and have been enjoying lots of leafy greens and watermelon. 

In light of the heat, tonight I'm talking about how I look after my plants on the field during the extreme temperatures. I'd love to know if you have any useful hints or tips.

In the second part of the episode you join me on a tour of the plot, where I chat about what's flowering, what's doing well, and things I can't find (those Veronica plugs). I know you can't see what I'm seeing but nevertheless I hope the chat is interesting.

Please come back and join me for the next episode - you're always very welcome!

Connect with me

If you like what you hear, please follow/subscribe to this podcast so that you're the first to hear new episodes when they become available every Tuesday and Friday. And if you enjoy this episode, please take a minute to leave a review because it really does help more cut flower-lovers just like you to find the podcast. 

Follow me on instagram @henhillcutflowers for a behind-the-scenes look at life on my cut flower plot. And you can find my website at www.henhillcutflowers.co.uk and my email is lydia@henhillcutflowers.co.uk.

Join me on my journey through a year of growing and selling cut flowers in England. I'm giving you the low-down on what it's really like, how I'm getting started, what you do and don't need, what I do when and why, the successes and failures, and just about everything in between. All in real time. With guest appearances from my chickens every now and then. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hi, welcome to my podcast, Becoming a Cut Flower Grower. I'm your host, Lydia, and I'm here to share my year of growing and selling cut flowers. I'll be giving you the lowdown on everything I'm doing and sharing all the highs and lows, the good times and the inevitable disasters, all in real time. Join me on my cut flower journey starting right now. Hello, and a very, very warm, quite literally, a very warm welcome to the latest episode. It's Friday, the 26th of June 2026. I have just sat down on a plastic seat up at the field to record this podcast and broken out into a sweat just sitting down in the chair. It's that bad. Very, very humid. If you're here in the UK, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. We've had an incredible three days of heat wave. I'm not sure how many temperature records we've broken, but I think it's quite a few. I think it's hottest June, hottest overnight temperature, all sorts of records have been broken, and it really has been very, very unpleasant. I think I was okay kind of Wednesday because that was like the first day of it. But what tends to happen, well, what does happen with these heat waves is the heat, of course, is cumulative, so it warms up the ground, and then the heat just gets radiated back to us over the next couple of days. And today has just been particularly sticky. Yesterday was quite breezy, but today has just been incredibly close. Lots of little annoying biting insects around, and just absolutely stifling. And the air conditioning in my car does not work, so I have to have all of the windows open, and then I can't hear myself think, and there's just hair in my face, and even though it's tied back. So it's just been a really, really unpleasant uh three days. But the plants have managed extremely well. Um extremely well, actually. I'm surprised because I just water once a day in the evenings, which I'll talk about later. Um, and I have been expecting to come up and find some things that have wilted, and God willing, nothing has wilted at all. It's been really quite extraordinary. It's almost the reverse, like some of them are just bolting, they're just getting ahead of themselves, and they're gonna flower and set seed and just be have done with the whole business, and I don't blame them. So I had a question about how the chickens cope with the heat, and they actually cope remarkably well, which never ceases to surprise me because they are very, very feathery. I've got some birds that have got an awful lot of feathers like goose, and then some slightly more leaner birds like Mo, who you know, she still has a lot of feathers, don't get me wrong, but she's a very sort of lean-looking bird, whereas goose just is enormous, and you know, goose also has feet, uh sorry, she has feathers on her feet as well. So they're very, very feathery, warm little creatures. Um, so they've been walking around with their wings held out away from their bodies to cool them down, and there are big spaces between them on the perches at night, they really do not want to get up close to anybody, and they get fresh greens every day. So at the moment they're having beetroot tops and spinach and also watermelon. They love any type of melon, to be honest with you. But they the watermelons are so big I can buy one and cut it into pieces so every little group of hens gets a piece of watermelon, and they do absolutely love that. Oh, that's the peacock again. Turns out there is a peacock next door. Um, yeah, he's leaving soon, but um apparently he's 30 years old, which is quite amazing. Anyway, I digress. So I have also gated off the vegetable area because in the evening when I come up, uh I let all the chickens out of all their little groups and they come and play on the grass for a while and dig through things and ferret about for bugs and whatnot. And so I thought I was being very clever by putting a gate on the entrance to the vegetable area. And um, it's not a proper gate, it's again it's two pieces of wire panel that I've attached with bungee cords. So if you're not careful and you open the gates, this massive piece of sheet metal uh springs back at you at 200 miles an hour. And I also made the mistake of putting the raw edges on the bit that you walk through rather than against the fence panels that I've tied it to. So it's a bit of a death trap, actually, just getting in and out of the vegetable garden. And what I failed to recognise, I was so focused on this gateway area, I didn't realise that one of the fence panels that these things are actually attached to is like an extra wide mesh. So I turned up the other day and the chickens had obviously ignored the gate because they couldn't get through, but they just walked straight through the uh fence panel mesh. Uh, and somebody has uh eaten quite a lot of their spinach beet, which is a perennial that's supposed to be in for a couple of years, so someone's decimated that, but it will recover. But anyway, they manage absolutely fine. I used to have one girl uh whose name escapes me now. Oh no, Whitney, that's right, Whitney Houston. She was really clever, she had this technique, she would actually stand in her water containers uh to cool her feet down, which is really clever, and I hoped that before she passed away she would um pass on that uh knowledge that she had to somebody else, but she hasn't passed it on, nobody else picked it up. They obviously thought she was potty, but she was always the coolest, coolest girl because she used to just stand there in a whole bowl of water. Now it I have just got home from house sitting, yes, house sitting again this week. Uh, this is the second heat wave that I have been house sitting, and it's almost like the gods don't like me anymore because the timing really could not be any worse. And all these dates were planned, you know, last year, so it's not like we I could move them around. I've committed to them and I'm very happy to do it. I absolutely love it. Um, so I have basically been um off doing bits and pieces in the morning and then just sat in the pool all afternoon because there is a pool up there, uh, which is amazing, and I have that sort of wrinkled skin when you've sat in the bath for too long and your fingertips go all wrinkly. I basically look like that because I've just spent hours and hours and hours just sat in water. It's a natural pool, so there are no chemicals whatsoever, um, which is amazing, and there's dragonflies and there's newts and there's all sorts of stuff going on. It's really, really incredible, but it has been astonishingly hard work. It probably doesn't sound like hard work, but even though I'm up there doing the house sitting and responsible for everything, I still have to go back to my place every day, sometimes twice a day, to do all the watering and the care of everything there, and then also be on the field two or three times a day sorting that out. So there's an awful lot of driving around, which in an unconditioned car in this weather has not been uh my favourite thing to do this week. But we've got to Friday night, I'm home, everything is fine. And I have been doing my limited amount of watering on the field and uh still only doing the annuals. So I have tried to stick to that rigidly, partly because I don't have very much water and also because the perennials have just been in the ground for such a long time. I know they've got their roots down and they are doing extraordinarily well. So it's really just the annual seedings that need a bit of a boost because they just don't have their roots low enough down in the soil to be able to draw up the water that they need. But thank goodness the um the soil seems to be really great, so I'm very pleased about that. It's it's clearly capable of supporting uh a high volume of plants, and that is wonderful. I haven't done any weeding either, so I am keeping the weeds to keep the soil covered. They're doing a perfect job, and they're also excuse me, they're also helping to feed the soil and the microbes in there. So I'm definitely not obsessing over. Well, I'm not, I'm just simply not doing any weeding at the moment. Uh the sweet peas have actually gone completely mad in the last two days. They sort of kicked off a little bit on Wednesday, there was about half a dozen open, and now there's just absolutely masses, and the the ones that are out are just absolutely beautiful. There don't seem to be quite enough King's Ransom for my liking. I bought 50 seeds, and I don't know that that's reflected on the field, which is seems to be a bit of a theme for me. I've got lots of Emily, which is a really really pretty one, and then I'm waiting for Castlewell and to come out, which is a slightly paler one. But overall, they're looking absolutely stunning. Um, I cut 55 of them this morning, uh, took some photos, and I just kept sniffing them. I just couldn't get over how just incredible they smell. They really are just like absolutely just stunning. Uh, I'm not water back to the watering, I meant to say that. Um I'm not watering the perennials or the dahlias at all. Um, they are also doing really, really well, including the ones that have only just gone in recently. And I am doing the odd little sprinkle on some of the roses, but again, they've been in for a while and they are doing their own thing, and they look absolutely marvellous. Marvellous, I mangled that one. They look absolutely marvellous. So I'm fine with how the watering is going, but I am running out, so I'm going to have to go and get some more and top up the IPCs next week. So when I was thinking about how everything had survived on the field this week, I thought I would share with you some of my tips for trying to well, it's not so much trying to keep things cool because everything is just hot, there's no way around it. Now, you could, if you had, or if I had lots of money and I had the inclination, you could just irrigate everything and spray everything down, and that that does help to lower the temperature, but that is absolutely not an option for me, and I wouldn't want to be using water like that anyway. But I know some people on some plots will have no choice, they'll have to do that. So, my number one thing for surviving extreme weathers like this is to keep the soil mulched, uh, with absolutely anything to be honest. But my go-to is uh chipped bark, um, and I've been slowly bringing as much up here as I can get my hands on and putting it around. Certainly, all the shrubs, the roses, the perennials, the dahlias, the random stuff that's just squirreled all over the place, uh, the sweet peas, you know, lots and lots of things. I hadn't got round to doing the annuals because they're very, very small and it would be super fiddly to do it, but now they're a bit bigger. I think I'm actually going to do that. I know I talked about it a few weeks ago, and there's all this um question about how much nitrogen is locked up by the uh decomposition of chipped bark, but I know that I've got pretty nitrogen-rich soil here, especially in the areas where all the nettles have been cleared away. So I'm not too worried about that to be honest, and I did say I was gonna give it a go, and I think I'm gonna try it next week and see how I get on doing that. But even not weeding is like a huge thing, and it's not laziness, it really does help to keep the soil moist and cooler. So you've only got to go and stick your hand in a pile of weeds and like just sort of move them out of the way a little bit and have a look at the soil, and it will always I mean nearly always be so much moister and darker in colour and cooler than soil that doesn't have anything on it. And you know, I have areas on the field obviously that I have not got around to doing any of these techniques for, and there is just you know soil there, and it gets baked and it gets very dry, the top layer just you know turns very, very dusty, and you have to dig a little bit further down to get to the good stuff, and that is pointless. So I have got some cardboard, and I'm going to be putting cardboard uh with some weights on top to cover up the beds that I'm slowly prepping to start doing all of the autumn sewing. But mulching would be my number one preferred option always, and I think chip bark is a great alternative. I know lots and lots of growers use black plastic when they're growing, and they make holes in it and the plants come up through it and everything. And you know, I'm not knocking what anybody else does, each to their own. I mean, totally each to their own. If and if you're growing, I guess, on a really huge scale, it seems like a fantastic option. I've never done it, and I don't want any plastic on the soil here, and that's just very much my personal preference. And I should stress, I'm not knocking anybody if they do this. But the black plastic will also heat up and make the soil warmer, and so there's that that can sometimes exacerbate problems because it's just soaking up the sunlight. Now, um storing oh, yeah, and the other reason why I love the mulch is that it um it reduces runoff. So when you water, and especially if you're watering on a dry soil and you're um seeing any kind of like splashback, or this the surface of the soil starts sort of moving and the water can't get taken in quickly enough and it just runs off. That is really dramatically halted if you have like a bark mulch on the on the surface because it it just acts differently and you know it just helps to keep the water where you actually want it to go. Now, storing water, as you know, I've got IBCs up here, 3,000 litre in total, plus all the water butts and everything else, and I try and store as much water as possible and save it and use it really, really, really carefully. Um, I've seen some uh reels on Instagram where people have found, you know, they've got to the field and they've found that their manes have been cut off or there's a broken pipe or there's been an incident down the road and they're suddenly in this awkward position where the water that they rely on is not available. So I would always, me personally, I'm not telling you what to do, me personally, I would always have spares like backup, backup water supplies. Mind you, having said that, I'm just about to run out of water, but uh out of the IBCs, but I have got all these other water butts that are like my backup plan, and they are going to be coming into action next week, so the water just has to be moved from where they are to where I actually need it to be. But the point is always have a backup if you can, even if you're on the mains water, because you just never know what's going to happen. Now, shade cover, this is something that I have seen people doing. It's not something that I have um done as standard on the field. Uh, if I did, I would use something like scaffolding netting from um, you know, trade stores and that kind of thing, because it's inexpensive. Um, and I do actually have some things at home that I actually that I will put a parasol over just to protect them during these you know extremely hot few days, not just temperature-wise, but the intensity of the sun as well. Because you know, the flowers just get scorched, uh, the leaves get scorched and burnt and curl up, and there's just no need. It's not just about keeping the plants wet, um, it's it's also about the actual the sunburn that these things get. So I'm not afraid to put up a parasol, but obviously that is not practical when you're growing on any kind of scale, but shade cover, good option if you want to reduce the damage. Now um having good soil is is also like a really, really important thing to do, and um, I'm always trying to learn about soil. I'm listening to all these different podcasts. I've been reading the Living Soil handbook, and I'm trying to learn as much as I can about it because I'm just really fascinated. And I I have done quite a lot of work on the field actually. Sometimes I I don't like to um what am I trying to say? I don't like to keep saying I'm so lucky with the soil because it's not just luck with the soil. Um, what I've realized is the areas where the soil is really good, it's where it's been cultivated for a couple of years because I was growing vegetables on it a couple of years ago, and obviously the chickens have been on it for there have been chickens on it for a decade. So it's um it's had kind of improvement to it, and the more I work with it, the better it seems to get. And I'm doing a no-dig, so I try and disturb it as much as possible unless I'm digging up nettles or digging holes to put things in, and you know, trying to keep these living paths going, which actually I don't have a problem keeping them going, I have a problem stopping them dead. Um, and I don't mean stopping them dead as in killing them, I mean just stopping them growing to like six foot tall, and then you actually it's easier to walk down the flower bed than it is to walk on the living paths. That's how silly it's getting here now. Um, but yeah, always working on the soil. And I always wonder how people who just grow in straight compost actually do it, because I find compost dries out very quickly and it's hard to keep it uh moist. I mean, certainly your own homegrown compost is going to be different, but shop bought compost that stuff, you know, one warm day and it just turns to absolute dust, it doesn't seem to have any kind of water holding capabilities whatsoever. So I I yeah, don't I'm not growing anything in straight compost. Um, but if I had to, I would definitely try and get a loamy compost or get hold of some homemade compost just so that it's got better water retention. And the other thing I try and do is I water in the evening. So the way that the plot is facing, we get all the evening sun, we get all the afternoon and evening sun, which is really, really amazing. Uh, and I do find that even in the height of the summer the temperature drops quite a lot overnight. There's often a dew in the ground, and um, I find the evening watering just gives gives the water time to soak into the soil and be absorbed by the plants overnight, plus this little boost that it gets from the dew coming down and settling before the daytime sun kicks in. So they everything pretty much has a bit of a break until lunchtime, and then that's when the sun really, really kicks in. So they are normally pretty reinvigorated and ready to start the afternoon by the time the sun gets round, and so that's why I like to water in the evenings. Um now I thought I would take you on a quick tour of the field, um, starting at the entrance gates, and just have a chat about what's flowering, uh, what's budded up, what's working, what's not, um, any surprises, and um what's finished or not sailable, and um just give you a bit of a chat. So uh there'll be a very short break while I uh get up out of this chair, wipe my brow, and make my way over to the entrance gate. So I'll see you in a second. Okay, it's me, I'm back. Now, the first thing that greets you when you walk into the flower field is this great big row of sweepies, and it's not actually that big, to be honest. I thought it was going to be bigger than it is this year, um, but it's gonna be bigger next year because I just am obsessed with these guys. So I've got King's Ransom and then Emily and then Castle Wellan at the end, which are the ones that the ducks have pinched all the tops out of, so those guys are having to kind of start again from scratch, but that's fine, we'll just have later flowers, which is quite nice. And off to the right, um, there's a bit of fennel, and then we've got a couple of rows of fantastic, beautiful purple echinacea, which has just got its flower heads all up, and these are such beautiful plants, they were tiny. I bought them, I think, two years ago from a neighbour of mine who's a fantastic grower, and he grew them from seed, and they really are spectacular plants. I cannot wait for those guys to come out. Behind them is a load of raspberries as well. Um, off on the left, we've got the table with some very random stragglers who have not made it into the ground yet. There's always some plastic trays of things which just sit lurking, uh, some of which are amaranthus, which need to go in the ground, and uh a tray of Cruspedia, which is my little yellow golf balls on sticks, and also um a whole tray of foxgalove seedlings. Now I had another diplomatic incident with my other half the other day. We went to do a job a couple of days ago, and he got there half an hour before me because I got stuck in traffic, and I got out of the car and he said, Great news, I've done loads of weeding for you. Now, this is this is my job, my client, and he was coming to help me as a subcontractor. But he thought he would just get out and try and be helpful, so he went round this garden and weeded everything, and was very proud to show me the bucket, and inside the bucket were all of the self-seeded foxgloves, which self-seed in the gravel, and I snaffle them and bring them up to the field and grow them on. Uh, and he destroyed the whole lot. And uh, also in the bucket were a couple of um very small oak tree seedlings which I had been saving until they got to a transplantable size, and he'd pulled them up as well. And he has this weird technique when he pulls things up, he breaks them in half before he throws them in the bucket. So, not only were these things ripped out the ground and dumped in the bucket, they'd also been broken in half. Uh so there was a very, very minor diplomatic incident there when I just thought I would probably get about 15 years to life if I murdered him right now. I could still carry on with my business when I got out. I thought, nope, no, better not do that. So, anyway, that was that was that. So, I do still have quite a few flux cuffs ready to go in the ground, but nowhere near as much as I thought I had. Now, off to the right, we've got helleniums and some rude beckia. Some of these got shifted down into the uh uh bear. Well, bed three basically, they got shifted from the new perennials area, but I didn't get round to moving these guys. I thought I'd leave them put, and they are just looking absolutely stunning this year. What I just need is like 10 or 20 times the volume of what I've got. It's never ever enough. Now, further down, I've got some buplurum. Um, no, I don't mean bupleurum, I mean bells of Ireland. I was given these by a fellow grower, and I have never been able to germinate them. You might remember me talking about them last year, didn't get anywhere with them. And so I've got about 50 plants, I guess, and they are really, really pretty. Now they don't look like the four or five foot tall things that Lisa Mason Ziggler, I've seen photos of hers in her book, and they're just like absolute beasts. Um, these guys are really, really, really short, but they're so so quirky. I'm really fascinated by them. Um, I haven't sold any yet, but um, they're just sitting here doing their thing, along with some grasses, the grasses that I picked up from a fellow grower's excess stock, and they are looking really nice. They're the ones with those little fat bunny tails on the ends of them. They are lovely. Now, interplanted in between all of the Rude Becky and Heleniums are the Craspedias, and I found those GM plugs I told you that I bought in November. I found those. What I haven't found is the Veronica. I actually checked my invoice and I bought GMs, Physicia, Flox, and Veronica, Owen Vibascum, and I found everything except the Veronica. So whether they didn't get planted out or they've just been swamped by something, I'm not entirely sure, but it's a bit weird not to have them. Um the self-seeded oil I are all finishing now. I've just left them to go to seed because I want to. Well, I was gonna say I was gonna harvest the seed and sow them myself, but I think I'm just gonna let them drop onto the ground and germinate themselves. I think the less I get involved in this, the better my results are going to be. So I'm just gonna leave those guys to do what they want. Then we come to the dahlia bed, which is quite a large bed, it takes up maybe a quarter of all my growing space, so it's quite a commitment. And I've got three rows, and then within each row is a double staggered row, and they are looking lovely. So the task this weekend is to actually get the supports up for those. I've got my road pins, and they are going to be supported this weekend because I just know that in about two days they're gonna be too big to handle. They're looking really, really lovely, as I said. Don't water them, don't do anything really. And I can see that I've got well, actually, some of them are budded up already. Nobody's ready to flower, but I think this guy's probably about a week or four to five days away from flowering, so they're really tramping on, and then suddenly you'll come across one who just really hasn't got himself together and is absolutely miles behind his neighbours, but some of them they're just like that. Um, I've got little stuff off to the left. I've got um a beautiful James Galway rose in, which is absolutely divine, and then some Amy, some more of the grasses. This is my Panicum Frosted Explosion, which is actually just opening, and the frosted explosion is so cute. So I'm just waiting to get a few more of those out before I can put them up for sale. And then a bed of Olaya that I sewed myself, they're all absolutely beautiful, come through the heat fine, and then two different lots of Clarkia. So you remember I planted the wrong lot out first, so I planted some that were younger than the ones that should have gone out by accident. So the younger ones were really, really short and very small and spindly. Um, and then I planted the second lot, the first lot anyway, whatever. It all got a bit of a mess. And um the hopeless spindly daftings have now put on masses of growth, and they're really, really pretty plants. They've just started flowering, and I don't think they really look anything like the packet, they're quite unusual. The leaves are almost a bit like a fuchsia, um, and the stem is a bit like a fuchsia. And then there's just this crazy purpley fuchsia pink flowers coming on them. They're really pretty, and they've there's so many flowerheads on them. They look like they're going to be absolutely mental. So that is really interesting. I'll have to wait and see. I don't know whether I would grow them again. They were really easy and they all germinated. I've got masses of the things, but they've just given me weeks and weeks of worry, and I'm not sure if they're going to be tall enough for anything apart from bud vases, which I'm just you know, there's a time and a place for bud vases, and that's fine, but obviously the prices are much lower than you would get for longer stems, so I'm not a huge fan of them. As in well, it's not that I'm not a huge fan of them, it's just you just think, well, if it was a 60 centimetre plant, I'd get a lot more money than if because he's a tiny one. And then towering over these beds is the cephalaria, which is the giant scabius, and this is in this gorgeous pale lemon colour, and it is I don't know how tall this guy is actually. Let me stand next to it and see. Okay, so seven feet tall, and it's not steaked, which is just bananas. Um, but they are amazing, and obviously, the 40% that got strimmed down by accident, uh, they're also flowering, just obviously shorter, but very, very impressive looking plants. And then at this point on the field, this is where the sort of semi-professional look comes in because this is where I actually had the turf cleared by Nigel, and I've created four beds coming down the hillside here. So bed one has got all my roses in, half of bed two is roses, and the rest is bearded iris and peonies. Bed three is um hydrangeas, then a load of annuals, and then most of the perennials. So Achillea, the pearl, eringiums, more Achillea, the normal one. Um what else is in there? Oh, another root load of Rubeckia, and then bed four has got it was supposed to be the foliage bed, but I didn't end up getting as much foliage as I wanted to because it's expensive if you get a decent size stuff, so it's kind of been taken over as the annual bed. So there's tons of scabius, there's the sapinaria, uh, stocks, cornflowers, snapdragons, daucus, status, and then we start with oh, something else. What is that? Oh, scabius again, went a bit mad on that, and then the start of the zinnias, and then they're just gonna run and run and run because I have got hundreds and hundreds of those guys to go in. Uh, so there's an awful lot going on, and um in terms of the positioning of where I put things, I'm really glad I put the annuals right below the IBCs. It makes watering quite easy, I don't have to travel too far. I'm still doing everything with a watering can so that I can keep an eye on how much I use, and also it means I have to stand and actually stare at things so I can notice or I'm more likely to notice things if I actually have to stand still and look at them for 30 seconds. So it all seems to be working out fine. The netting, I'm so proud of the netting and the staking. I've got two tiers of netting on the Achillea and the Oryngeum and the other Achillea, the pearl, and it's working absolutely perfectly, like everything has just gone perfectly straight up. Which, if you'd seen this the mess I got into last year and the time I wasted with bamboo canes, which I couldn't get into the soil because it was too hard, and string, and it was just it was absolutely ridiculous. So road pins at the ends of the beds and halfway along the beds, and then P and B netting in. Yes, it's plastic, but it's not touching the ground, and it's going to be recycled and used for a number of years, and the difference, honestly, the difference I wouldn't have if you told me, I would never have thought it would ever look this good, and I'm so proud of it. I really am just absolutely blown away by how well it's working. So um, the only thing that hasn't quite worked out, the hydrangeas have been really odd this year, and um oh sorry, the traffic's really bad tonight, all the boy races are out. Uh the hydrangea stems have have hardly put any growth on, and then they flowered. So the useful stem is about 30 centimetres, which is yeah, back to the bird vases again. That's what they'll be going off for, and they'll look stunning in that. But I'm just really surprised because I had really long stems from the plants last year, and I pruned them the same way that I always prune them, so I don't quite understand what's happened with those guys, but there you are, they're still gonna go and go off to an event and they'll have a fantastic day, but they're just not at all what I was expecting this year. And the roses are looking amazing, they have really floured their socks off in a way that I didn't really think the roses were gonna get going this year, and there was a point in the year where I'd kind of just not written them off, but I just thought, right, forget about roses, they're not gonna do anything, just let them spend the year relaxing and getting their roots down. And then as soon as I sort of forgot about them, they all just floured their socks off, and they're quite extraordinary. But the sun has given them a bit of a clobbering. Some have done better than others, so I'm making some notes on who's doing well and who seems to be able to cope with the heat. Um, Chandos beauty is just absolutely stunning, but there's one next to it which is um a kind of a pale cream floribunder, which is just extraordinary, and the flowers just stay on a really, really long time. I've got some roses at home that you just look at them and all the petals fall off, and these guys are just just amazing. I'm so proud of them. I really am. Um so that's all fine, and the Ragosas have been flowering, but they are blinking, you miss it fast. Um, but they're very pretty when they do flower, and um the living paths, I'm so proud of them. I mean, they're just amazing. I've got white clover everywhere, it looks really pretty, and then there's this um really crazy plant called Roseda Lutea or Receda something anyway, and it is really, really amazing. It's about I don't know, two and a half foot, three foot tall, and it's everywhere, and it's absolutely stunning. I love it. I'm gonna make um an arrangement up myself and use it. I'm trying to tempt um Jo, my wedding event florist, to have some, and she she's not having any bit. Um I think it's not quite right for what she's had so far, but I think in a bouquet it would look absolutely drop dead gorgeous. So I'm gonna cut some of those and just experiment myself. And not that I know what I'm doing, but I'm gonna have a bit of a go. So that is uh a quick tour of the field, and I know you can't see it, but I hope you can imagine it in your mind with me talking about it. I was racking my brains to think about what to do for a plant profile of the week, and then I thought, you know what, it's just too hot. It's too hot. Uh so I hope you'll forgive me that there is no plant profile of the week, but I will put one into next week's episode. So I hope you've survived the week, and I hope you have a great weekend. Temperatures are dropping over the weekend, and then they'll be about 10 degrees lower next week in the UK, which is fantastic. So I hope you have a wonderful weekend and have lots of fun, and that you'll come back and join me for the next episode because you're always always very welcome. All the best.