This year we had a great number of fuchsias in the garden after I started to master the art of fuchsia propogation.
last year's attempt at taking cuttings was a total washout - or should I say a total mould-fest. Not one took. This year though I had the advantage of a shady greenhouse and shrink wrap rather than a heated propogator in the kitchen. The greenhouse worked so much better in that almost all cuttings took so we ended up with dozens of mini-fuchsias around the garden. the only fuchsia which take was the white hawkshead - which is a hardy fucshia - so ther emust be some trick that I have missed there. it had excatly the same treatment but you can see from the plants that they are very diifferent to the other fuchsias (example below)
Hawkshead (the white one on the left or top) has much smaller leaves and smaller flowers than a typical fuchsia such as that on the right (or below). It is also much more erect - in fact much more like one of te bush fuchsias that are used for hedging rather than a soft growth fuchsia - as I said more digging into the literature is required for next cutting season.
Anyhow I was going to put a lot of photos of all the different types we had - must be at least a dozen - but then I looked at the quality of the flowers and they weren't brilliant. So many of them had spots on the petals or scorch marks from wind and rain. And after we thought our plants were so much better than the ones at RHS.
Anyway the fuchsia below is my new favourite colour combination (now that the delta sarahs have decided to get some pink tinging on the white petals.) So my new best favourite is the one below which I'm fairly certain is fuchsias Charlie Dimmock that we got from T&M in the special trial - $6.99 for 5 plants, DVD and fertiliser. It is a very harmionious blend of colours and I think that Jiurie likes it too.
http://www.thompson-morgan.com/plants1/product/p3276/1.html
