Tiny Dancer

The slender, elegant blooms of Fuchsia magellanica are in a different class to the big, blowsy hybrids

Fuchsias can be a divisive plant: some gardeners love them, others really don’t – particularly when it comes to those hybrids with the over-the-top, slightly chubby, ballerina-tutu flowers. Yet there is one fuchsia that can often persuade the doubters: Fuchsia magellanica. Its flowers are slender, elegant, graceful. In a world of Mavis Cruets, Fuchsia magellanica is Margot Fonteyn.

For all its graceful flowers, however, this fuchsia could also be considered a thug. It stole another fuchsia’s identity for the best part of 100 years, although really that was the fault of the botanists who mistook it for Fuchsia coccinea. The real F. coccinea languished in Oxford Botanic Garden until botanists realised they were two distinct species; in the meantime F. magellanica had “spread to every garden in the Kingdom”, Joseph Hooker wrote.

It’s an invasive plant in other parts of the world too, smothering native flora in Australia and Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean. Thankfully in our climate it isn’t problematic, and if you visit south-west Ireland in early summer, when the hedgerows drip with its pendent burgundy-pink blooms, it’s hard not to be charmed.

The species name comes from the Strait of Magellan, which was where French naturalist Philibert Commerson collected it in December 1767, although it had been discovered earlier by Louis Feuillée, who named it ‘thilco’. Commerson was part of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s voyage to circumnavigate the globe. His valet was on board with him, but it was later revealed that the valet was actually Jeanne Baret, a woman disguised as a man (and as a result, the first woman to circumnavigate the globe). It’s thought she was Commerson’s mistress, but her presence didn’t distract him from his work: he described the climber bougainvillea, among other plants, during the trip.

Thanks to the mix-ups with F. coccinea, there’s little hard evidence for F. magellanica being grown in the UK before the 1820s, but this beautiful Chilean native has certainly not looked back. ■

HOW TO GROW Fuchsia magellanica is hardy once it’s established when, even if the top growth is cut back by frost, it will shoot from the base or its woody framework. It will grow well in sun, dappled or full shade and thrives in fertile soil. Mulch the base while it’s establishing.