How to grow... Fuchsia

Want to bring your baskets and borders to life with continuous bursts of dancing fuchsia flowers? Anne Swithinbank looks at buoyant bushy types, uprights and trailing beauties

- Anne Swithinbank

FINDING out how the ancestors of our garden plants grow in the wild is both fun and instructive. For instance, we might think of fuchsias as hanging basket fillers or patio plants, yet most of the 100 or so species are native to Central and South America where they make vigorous shrubs in their native mountain woodlands, often pollinated by hummingbirds.

In her painting Wildflowers of Chanleon, Chile, Victorian artist Marianne North depicted Fuchsia magellanica along with other Chilean natives hardy in milder parts of the UK. The Marianne North Gallery at Kew Gardens is packed with her work, and several excellent books allow us to glimpse the world she painted.

Fuchsia blooms are typically dangling, their buds breaking into four sepals flying over skirts of a contrasting colour. Ever since their discovery towards the end of the seventeenth century, they have caught our attention, and breeding work – especially that carried out in the USA during the 1940s and 1950s – has given rise to thousands of cultivars. Some are hardy enough to grow and flower outdoors in all but the coldest regions Alamyof the UK, delivering a long season of late summer colour, and others are more tender and in need of frost protection.

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