Hardy fuchsias take a bow
SOME plants are Andy Warhol-like, famous for 15 minutes (usually after a brief appearance on a TV gardening spot). Chocolate cosmos springs to mind.
Others are so overdone you get fed up with them (think Leylandii) and few never really reach their rightful place in the ranks of garden stardom.
It’s to this latter group that I believe hardy fuchsias belong.
They’ve been around for a long time and we take them so much for granted that we don’t really notice them. But perhaps we should.
Unlike their hugely popular frost-tender cousins, which for decades have been summer essentials and stars of millions of summer tubs and hanging baskets, hardy fuchsias have never really caught on.
Yes, they’ve lurked around, largely overlooked, in cottage gardens since Victorian times, while in Cornwall and the south coast of Ireland, hardy fuchsias form the famous flowering hedges along country lanes.
Yet trendy gardeners have always tended to write off the hardy Fuchsia magellanica riccartonii as a bit of a “granny plant”, despite loving the long dangly earring-like flowers as small children.
Some may have wondered how the plant managed to survive outside all winter when its “classier” patio cousins died of cold.
It’s because its ancestors came not from tropical and subtropical South America like the wild species that were used to create modern fuchsia hybrids but from Tierra del Fuego where conditions could turn a tad chilly at times.
So why the new interest? Whether it was due to the great hurricane of 1987 that wiped out greenhouses overnight or the steady hike in fuel prices that made it too costly to overwinter large collections of frost-tender plants, breeders started turning their attention to the hardy fuchsia.
The results have been trickling on to the market over the past few years and even older varieties that we once rarely saw are turning up everywhere. Now there are dozens of really good ones.
Just take a look at the small print on the labels next time you are fuchsia-buying.
“Hawkshead” is a particularly lovely, pea-green, bushy shaped plant completely covered in long, slim, pure greeny-white tubular flowers.
“Lady Bacon” is also a cracker, an upright three-footer whose slender flowers have white sepals, a light blue tube and long pinky stamens.
However the big area of interest is for fuchsias whose flowers look just like those of summer patio favourites but growing on hardy plants.
Seek them out in nurseries and garden centres.
Unless you’re in the know you’d never realise they could withstand a winter outdoors.
This means for the first time that you can enjoy fab fuchsia flowers in the garden from July to October and leave plants outdoors without taking cuttings or bringing plants in.
EVEN if the tops are cut down by severe frost, the plants re-grow from the roots next spring.
You can use hardy fuchsias like conventional flowering shrubs, in full sun or light shade or in all-year-round containers that don’t need winter protection.
Naturally upright varieties also make brilliant flowering hedges.
They are thrifty too, as you can quickly root enough cuttings taken from one bought parent plant to raise a whole hedge for free.
The best time to plant hardy fuchsias is between late May and the end of July but if you find a bargain now, or a variety you can’t resist, grab it.