How hot did it get in your garden? I felt privileged to be in Scotland during the heat emergency. Here it got to 29 deg C, with what I think of as ‘proper hot weather’ for just two days. I must admit to enjoying to novelty, though inspection of the garden has since revealed quite a bit of stress: not least because we have not had rain for weeks! In honour of what I hope is a very rare phenomenon, here are some hot reds for this week’s #SixonSaturday, to commemorate the heatwave.

Most interesting first? I picked up a few cala lily quorms at the Chelsea Flower Show in May. This one is a gorgeous rich red, as are its stems.

Despite the heat, some careful feed and watering has allowed a few sweetpeas to keep going, one of them a rich red (shame the resting hoverfly wasn’t quite in focus!).

I’ve shown these as one of my six recently, but here they are again, as I can’t look at them enough. I love a big blousy bright red dahlia.

A couple of edibles next. I kept the greenhouse as cool as I could with wide open doors and windows, and regular dousing of the floor with buckets of water (still great to work at home sometimes!). The tomatoes loved it, and the first few are ripening now.

The heat also seems to have boosted the beans. This year, I have fewer plants, but each one is producing swathes of red flowers. It’s almost time for beans.

Last, one of my favourite flowers of the summer (though I can’t quite work out how we got here so fast) has just started to bloom. Crocosmia lucifer is here.

That’s my #SixonSaturday Have a good weekend, the weather here is back to normal, I’ll be harvesting lots of berries which instantly ripened in last week’s heat. Stay safe, take care out there, and don’t forget to follow the crowd on twitter and via the web from links to the originator of #SixonSaturday, the Propagator himself.