Sowing Seeds of Success
Peter Baye, Ph.D.
Annapolis, California, Vallejo Branch
No doubt, the fuchsia’s retreat as a premier flowering shrub in the Pacific coast landscape is due to the fuchsia gall mite. The fuchsia gall mite really poisoned popular taste for fuchsias. It changed the casual gardener’s perception of the fuchsia from an easy, carefree, almost ever-blooming shrub with endless variety of color and form, to a demanding, high-maintenance exotic that performs reliably only when toxic pesticides are used. Only dedicated fuchsia enthusiasts, most of whom who fell in love with fuchsias before their fall from horticultural grace, are normally willing to devote the time and effort to maintaining them, and willing to tolerate the disappointment of a gall mite infestation. Most gardeners are practical, and simply trade the fuchsia’s spot in the garden for an easier species.
One of the mandates of the AFS is to promote the appreciation and use of fuchsias, not just to promote knowledge and lore of fuchsias to an inner circle of club members. To succeed at broadening the popularity and appreciation of fuchsias, we simply need an approach to mitigate the gardener’s disappointment with gall mite that will be acceptable to general gardeners. What should that approach be? Can the fuchsia recover from a decline of popularity, as it did after World War I? Are we approaching the dawn of a fuchsia revival, or the dusk of its permanent decline?
Unfortunately, there are no silver bullets for the problem of fuchsia gall mite. All proposed solutions for the gall mite problem must face the marketplace, the fickle tastes of popular gardening. Slavish non-toxic sanitation measures, like spraying alcohol, soap, and other home remedies for preventing infestations of gall mite, may be effective for true fuchsia devotees, but spraying of any type, toxic or not, is just not appealing to most gardeners.
Some fuchsia enthusiasts have an acquired taste for cultivating wild fuchsia species. But I concede that no matter how strong that enthusiasm is, it is not likely to spread beyond an elite circle of collectors and hobbyists. I also share a love for wild fuchsia species, but after a decade of showing them off to sophisticated horticulturists, as well as ordinary home gardeners, only a small number of fuchsia species offer strong popular appeal for today’s tastes. Fuchsia hybrids from less familiar sections of the genus, like “triphyllas’, encliandras, and long-tubed cluster-flowered fuchsias, simply don’t resonate with popular perceptions and tastes for the classic garden fuchsia.
Mite-resistant fuchsias: not yet in their prime
The same is true for many of the mite-resistant fuchsia cultivars. I have spent over a decade collecting, testing, and breeding mite-resistant fuchsia cultivars, seeking a breakthrough plant that would spread like wildfire through the commercial nursery trade, and hoist the fuchsia back to popular gardens. There are a number of fairly garden-worthy mite-resistant fuchsia cultivars in trade, but only a very limited range of flower colors and forms. The stage of “evolution” for mite-resistant fuchsias today is similar to the first decade of the fuchsias introduction to horticulture in the mid-19th century. If you look up the old catalogues of fuchsias from the 1840s to 1850s, there were an awful lot of minor variations on big and small red-and-purple fuchsias with lots of names.
The same state of affairs applies to many of today’s fairly short list of mite-resistant fuchsias with traditional flower shape. A lot of “wild type” traits, like red-and-purple classic flowers on robust arching to climbing shrubs, tend to prevail in available good commercial mite-resistant cultivars like “Angel’s Earrings’, ‘Dainty Angel’s Earrings’, ‘Campo Thilco’ and ‘Campo Molina’. Some of these only perform at their best when they grow large (like their wild parents), and don’t compete well for sale at garden centers featuring lots of gallon containers off the nursery truck.
There is some limited variation in flower color in mite-resistant fuchsias, approaching some classic Victorian fuchsias (‘Galfrey Blush’, ‘Galfrey Lye’, with white or blush-pink tubes and sepals), but these cultivars are not widely available in the trade. Breeding fuchsias for mite-resistance, not surprisingly, often results in breeding a lot of other “wild-type” traits of their mite-resistant Brazilian parents, tending to drown out the rich variation in color and form we have come to expect in garden fuchsias. Many of the subtlest and most garish colors in fuchsias are due to mutations that breeders have accumulated over a century, and wild genes for red and purple pigments and vigorous growth often dominate and mask them, up to three generations of crosses with classic fuchsias. And often, the plants that have the interesting flower shapes and colors lack strong mite-resistance.
One or two red-and-purple fuchsias in a garden usually will not satisfy a fuchsia gardener’s appetite for variety. What good is a new mite-resistant fuchsia if it really isn’t that different from the last one, or two, or three?
A clue from the early history of fuchsia breeding
There is hope for working escaping the redundancy of the short list of mite-resistant fuchsias, and bringing more color and variation in the still-limited array of mite-resistant fuchsias. I believe the key is by looking to the early history of fuchsia breeding for guidance.
Most early fuchsia “breeders” were really not doing refined breeding work like today’s meticulous amateur breeders. They generally did not work scientifically, keeping careful records, controlling pollen flow as though in a greenhouse experiment. On the contrary, many of them worked like natural selection–messy, uncontrolled shotgun approaches, based on huge numbers of seedlings, random luck, time, and lots and lots of repetition.
Early fuchsia breeders were often disparaged as careless “sowers”, substituting huge numbers of seedlings for control and skill at hybridization. But this is mere snobbery (a widespread trait of horticulturists). The early fuchsia breeders were intuitively very wise practical geneticists, even without scientific genetic theories to guide them. They knew that they were working with a very limited amount of genetic variation to breed with. And they also knew that they depended on finding lucky, random new combinations of genes, or even rarer mutations, to find something really new and interesting to breed.
Knowledge, control, and skill simply don’t generate raw mutations and novel combinations of traits: time, large numbers of seedlings, and luck do. In other words, many early fuchsia breeders emphasized selection and large numbers of seedlings, rather than control of breeding lines, as their main strategy for developing novel colors and forms of fuchsias.
The early historic breeding strategy of fuchsia breeders was quite successful. In a matter of a few decades, fuchsias changed from plants with more variety in their names than their flowers, to the splendid spectrum of Victorian and Edwardian “classic” forms (doubles, pastels, whites, ‘oranges”, trailers) we still treasure.
Is the fuchsia’s past the key to the fuchsia’s future?
How can this proven but archaic strategy for breeding novelty into fuchsias apply to mite-resistant strains? Or can it?
Things have changed quite a bit in the horticultural trade since the 19th century. Most nurserymen then would breed their own varieties to keep up with competition; commerce generated the motivation for breeding. Nurserymen could sow thousands of seeds to select new varieties because they had the production capacity to do it. Not so today. Commercial nurseries and breeding are now very separate enterprises. Few commercial breeders of fuchsias are active, and they are certainly not actively pursuing goals for mite-resistance, when the market is for hanging baskets. Most fuchsia breeding today is done by interested and skilled amateurs, and only a small percentage of fuchsia enthusiasts venture into breeding.
I suspect that so few fuchsia cultivators engage in breeding because of the mistaken impression that it requires a high level of elite skill, and because of the official discouragement against registering too many new but indistinct cultivars. I believe those impressions arose in response to a lot of “vanity breeding” in the years before the fuchsia mite. “Vanity breeding” refers to relatively indiscriminate registration of fuchsia names for plants that are not very distinct or garden-worthy, just for the sake of having one’s “own” fuchsia.
A look at the registration of new fuchsia cultivars in the last few years, however, shows that vanity breeding is no longer the threat it once was, particularly in the United States, where there are exceedingly few active fuchsia breeders. Europe and Australia are overwhelmingly produce and register novel fuchsia hybrids. Relatively few of these cultivars, unfortunately, enter the commercial trade in the United States, though some are circulated among collectors. We are at little risk of flooding the market with inferior varieties in the United States; rather fuchsia breeding may go extinct in the country where new cultivars are traditionally registered.
A Proposal for Grassroots Fuchsia Breeding
At the risk of offending the AFS. with calls for anarchy in fuchsia breeding, I would like to propose that fuchsia growers here carry out a small revolution, and revive the old fuchsia “sowers” habits.
In recent years, in addition to my conventional, labor-intensive hybridization work, I have collected open-pollinated fruits in bulk from some of my best mite-resistant fuchsias, squashed them, and sowed them in open outdoor beds, just like the old fuchsia sowers. The hybridization is done entirely by hummingbirds, which cross all the fuchsia cultivars that are flowering at the same time in my garden. I let the seedlings crowd and select themselves to some extent, and then pepper them with mite-infested fuchsia foliage. I cull the non-resistant ones (and there are surprisingly few non-resistant seedlings from some good resistant “stud” plants), and allow the survivors to grow to flowering.
Using this high-volume screening and semi-natural selection “method” if you can call it that, I have managed to breed some flower colors in mite-resistant hybrids that I had been unable to achieve through a decade of more controlled efforts with smaller numbers of seedlings.
There is nothing in this selection “method” of sowing that the average fuchsia grower could not do, and probably better than I.
Perhaps some fuchsia growers would be nauseated by the idea of testing seedlings by deliberately infesting them with gall mite. But if so, that testing can be done “naturally” rather than deliberately, if you haven’t the will (or stomach) for it.
It doesn’t take long to generate new mite-resistant strains of fuchsia if you start with a few good berry-forming, resistant ‘stud’ plants. If you turn up a lucky new seedling, try another old fuchsia tradition – swap cuttings, and try your new home-made strain in different gardens to learn about its preferences and tolerances.
There may be some concern that a call for grassroots breeding would cause a proliferation of unregistered fuchsia names and cause chaos. If so, I suggest that we adapt a simple habit from old rose collectors who specialize in collecting unidentified “found” roses in pursuit of ancient lost cultivars. To avoid confusing or mislabeling names, rose collectors apply “study names” (usually noted with {brackets}) to act as provisional references for plants in doubt. After a few years of testing your selected novel mite-resistant “sower’s fuchsia” under a study name, and you are certain that it deserves registration and propagation, you can legitimize the name by registering it. (For those of us whose memories may be going, the use of numbers or codes to distinguish candidate fuchsia cultivars instead of study names is quite inconvenient.)
In my opinion, the need for a huge infusion of variety in mite-resistant fuchsias is much more urgent than the need to keep nomenclature security as tight as it has been in recent decades. We cannot look to the horticultural industry or sciences to “cure” fuchsias of the gall mite curse by biological controls or genetic engineering. The economic basis for it just isn’t there. We will have to do it ourselves, using traditional methods.
In the 19th century, only a handful of nurserymen-breeders generated a dazzling genetic legacy of fuchsias we now enjoy. I would suggest that the hundreds of amateur fuchsia growers today, working independently, could cumulatively accomplish even more by growing seed saved from mite-resistant plants that are pollinated randomly among the rich varieties present in their gardens. In doing so, you would be participating in a rather ancient tradition, reconnecting with your horticultural history, and your fuchsia “roots”.
I look forward to the brilliant discoveries generated by a grassroots army of mite-resistant fuchsia-growing Edisons and Burbanks!