Three British-bred FUCHSIA cultivars are available from Suttons Seeds in a special pack of six (two of each), each of the three new varieties being named in honour of an outstanding British sportsman.

• Fuchsia Sir Ian Botham – Cricket
• Sir Steve Redgrave – Rowing
• Jonny Wilkinson – Rugby Union

Fuchsia Jonny Wilkinson is an upright variety, Sir Steve Redgrave is a trailer while Sir Ian Botham is somewhere between, described as ‘semi-upright’.

Each sportsman has nominated a charity to which royalties from sales will be paid. Click on the links above to see and buy each variety separately on the Suttons Seeds site, or economise by buying the pack of six:
British sporting legends – fuchsia varieties

From time to time I plan to include news items that have caught my attention. I’ll not promise anything exhaustive but will try to pay attention to different areas of the country. Here are a first few.

Terrific display at the town’s 25th annual fuchsia show.
THERE was a wonderful display at the recent Louth & District 25th Annual Fuchsia Show at the Royal British Legion Hall. Despite a difficult summer there were 122 plants on show with many different shapes, sizes and colours. [The Louth Leader, 1 Sept]

Recent Fuchsia Show at Belsay Hall, Northumberland.
On the weekend of August 20th and 21st there was a Fuchsia Show at Belsay in Northumberland. Belsay Hall, built around a 14th century pele tower and surrounded by splendid gardens is now in the care of English Heritage and provides a great setting for many events. The Northumberland Fuchsia Society held its annual show there recently.

Harrogate Autumn Flower Show.
One of the country’s premier horticultural shows, the Harrogate Autumn Flower Show, is this year scheduled for 16-18 September (Friday-Sunday). The British Fuchsia Society will be there in the Specialist Societies Marquee.

That’s it for now. More soon.

As an enthusastic fuchsia grower I have to confess to getting rather irritated at the number of misspellings of the word fuchsia.

Fuchsia 'Winston Churchill'

It seems to me that the easiest way to ensure the correct order of the letters is to recall that the plant is named after a man with the surname Fuchs (German for fox). Well-known people with that name have included Sir Vivian Fuchs (1908-1999) the great trans-Antarctic explorer. More notorious than famous was the nuclear physicist and spy, Klaus Fuchs, who passed British and American atomic secrets to the Russians in the 1940s.

However, from the point of view of this site the most important Fuchs was the early German botanist Leonhart Fuchs (1501-1566), although he was not the discoverer of the fuchsia plant. That honour goes to the French scientist monk Dom Charles Plumier who found the previously unknown plant (fuchsia triphylla) during his time in the Caribbean in 1696/97. He named the new genus in honour of Leonhart Fuchs.

So when writing or typing ‘fuchsia’ remember, it is not ‘fuschia’ but Fuchs-ia, in memory of Leonhart.

Recently I spotted a good illustration of the need to turn your fuchsia pots every few days during early growth if you want to end up with a broadly symmetrical plant. This Fuchsia “Beacon” had been left unturned for several weeks. From this side it’s beginning to look quite nice and from the look of the buds should flower even more profusely in coming weeks. (It did!)

Fuchsia 'Beacon' - facing outwards from the wall

But look at the other side when we turn the plant around and see the side that had been up against the wall.

Fuchsia 'Beacon' reverse side

In this case I’m happy to grow this plant against the wall, but if it had been intended for a more open position there would have been a problem.

I’ve just now updated the page on Fuchsia ‘Carmel Blue’ and added a photograph from my own garden taken this afternoon. This is one of my favourite fuchsias.

I will freely admit that the bookstore was an afterthought, and it needed a format 50 pixels wider than the main site. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry. What it boils down to is that I’ve had to set it up technically a little apart from the other pages, and you might notice the site expanding as you go into it, then shrinking back as you return.

Actually I don’t think that’s very important and wonder why I wrote it. The key thing is that now, in addition to fuchsia pictures and posters, have fuchsia books, a selection of other garden books, and some fuchsia and garden DVDs available for purchase. The transactions will actually be handled by Amazon.co.uk, not by The-Fuchsia-File, and your books will be mailed to you by them.

Remember, this is serviced by Amazon.co.uk, so items are priced in UK pounds. I’m hoping later to add a similar store powered by Amazon.com, on which transactions will of course be in US dollars.

Quite apart from fuchsia plants and flowers in the garden we can enjoy fuchsias through the eyes of artists, photographers and writers, so in addition to pages about cultivars and cultivation I’m adding pages about artwork and books.

Today I’ve added two pages to the site with the facility to buy beautiful fuchsia wall art. Framed art work and photographs depicting fuchsias, whether from life or from artistic imagination, will provide gorgeous decoration in your home or office.

For convenience we’ve included two separate store pages – one priced in US dollars and the other in British pounds, linking to art.com and allposters.co.uk respectively.