Identifying Fuchsias by Name
Sherwin Low
Vallejo Newsletter, September 2006
I read an interesting article in the Wednesday, August 10th San Francisco Chronicle. A reader had written Pam Peirce, who is the author of Golden Gate Gardening and has a Question & Answer column in the newspaper. The reader wrote, “When we moved into our house about two years ago, we inherited two fuchsias…They look almost exactly like the picture of ‘Campo Thilco’ in your book…I assume they can’t be ‘Campo Thilco' because that cultivar resists mites and rust…I’ve been looking at fuchsia pictures on the internet, and no other cultivar appears to combine the same sepal length and recurve with corolla form and color; tubes and stamens are also very close…How do you identify fuchsia cultivars? There are so many extremely similar forms.”
Ms. Peirce sent the reader’s question and photo to Peter Baye, who introduced ‘Campo Thilco,’ which is a spontaneous hybrid between Fuchsia magellanica and the mite-resistant Fuchsia ‘campos-portoi’. Peter looked at the photograph and said it just happened to be one he could identify. “It is ‘Cardinal,’ a hybrid introduced in 1937 that survives in many Bay Area gardens.”
Ms. Peirce continues, “As to identifying fuchsias from photos, Peter tells me that although we lucked out on this one, fuchsia identification is a surprisingly iffy business. There are many errors in books and in the nursery trade and no overall collection of pressed specimens to go by. He suggests that when you are trying to identify a fuchsia, you look at both photos and text in a number of books and/or web sources to see whether they agree about color, shape, size of flower, growth form of the plant, etc.”
SOooooo, during these cool summer days, check your fuchsias to make sure that each one has a plant tag with the name of the fuchsia written in pencil (no pen or marker; not even permanent marker) so you will be able to identify them by name next year.