🪴 GoDeep
Search
← University Challenge
Portrait of Fuchsia

Nature · Shrubs

Fuchsia

Neophyte · from Chile and Argentina · to 3 m · flowers summer–autumn · hedges in the mild west

Fuchsia magellanica — Onagraceae

The hardy fuchsia, or lady's eardrops, is the pendant scarlet-and-purple hedge shrub of western Britain and Ireland, a South American plant that has become part of the landscape of west Scotland and the south-west coast. Most hedgerow plants are the cultivar 'Riccartonii', reputedly raised near Edinburgh around 1830. It is the fuchsia that survives British winters outdoors.

How to spot them

  • ▸Arching shrub 1.5 to 3 m with slender stems and small, opposite or whorled, oval, toothed leaves
  • ▸Pendulous flowers with long scarlet sepals and a purple corolla, hanging on long stalks through summer and autumn
  • ▸Naturalised in hedgerows, scrub, walls and stream banks, mostly in mild, wet, coastal places in the west
  • ▸Stems may be killed to the ground in cold winters and reshoot from the base
  • ▸Look-alikes: garden hybrids have double, larger flowers and are not hardy; the hardy scarlet-and-purple hedge fuchsia is this species or its cultivar

How to know it

A hedge shrub whose hanging flowers have long scarlet sepals and a purple centre, familiar around west Scottish and Irish coasts

Fuchsia — Fuchsia magellanica.

Its common name 'lady's eardrops' describes the pendant flowers

Fuchsia magellanica.

The cultivar 'Riccartonii', believed to have been raised near Edinburgh around 1830, forms most hedges in Ireland and Scotland

Fuchsia.

A native of Argentina and Chile that reached Britain in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century

Fuchsia magellanica.

In the cold it dies back to the ground, so hedges in colder regions lose their structure each winter

Fuchsia — the RHS on hardy hedging.

Its genus commemorates the sixteenth-century German botanist Leonhart Fuchs

Fuchsia.

Quick-fire facts

  • •Fuchsia magellanica, family Onagraceae; the genus honours Leonhart Fuchs
  • •Native to Chile and Argentina; introduced to British gardens in 1788, or perhaps as late as the 1820s (BSBI; sources differ)
  • •Classified a neophyte in Great Britain and Ireland; occurs from the Channel Islands to Shetland, frequent in west Scotland and the south coast of England (BSBI)
  • •The hedgerow plant is nearly always the cultivar 'Riccartonii', raised before 1850 at Riccarton near Edinburgh (BSBI)
  • •Grows in hedgerows, scrub, stream sides and walls, to about 450 m (BSBI)
  • •Spreads by suckering and by bird-dispersed seed (BSBI)
  • •RHS calls it lady's eardrops, with scarlet sepals and a purple corolla, growing to 1.5 to 2.5 m and hardy to H4 (RHS)
  • •Berries are technically edible, though rarely grown for fruit in the UK (RHS)

Drill it — 6 cards

1 / 6new card

Sources