There are about 10,000 different hybrids to choose from and the colours range from white through to orange, red, blue, purple and even a deep purple bordering on black. In fact yellow is the only one missing. The only other thing missing with fuchsias is scent. They have no perfume.

The flower sizes range from 1cm. To 10cm.. The blooms vary from single, semi double, double and tubular.

They can be trained as bushes, standards, trailers and even bonsai.

In Ireland and Scotland hedgerows made up of fuchsias can be seen along the roads.

Fuchsias are one of the easiest flowers to propagate. To produce a true cultivar cuttings are used. Seeds don’t yield a true hybrid the result is usually weaker and unpredictable so they are rarely used.

The tip of a growing plant is taken (I prefer the tip to be about half an inch long) and planted in a mixture of peat and gravel in a 2 inch pot. In about 14 days the plant will have taken as shown by the colour of the leaf. As the pot is filled with roots the plant is potted on into larger sized pots, depending on what you wish to do with the plant. This is dictated by the plant, so it is important to know your plants as they will lend themselves to different types of growth. Some are very lax in growth and make good trailers whilst others are inclined to be tall and strong and lend themselves to being trained into standards.

If you intend to just grow the fuchsia on as a bush then every couple of leaves just pinch out the tip this will then produce two more stems from the pinch out. So you can see that we will progress from 1 to 2 to 4 stems and so on. Some plants tend to have smaller distances between the leaves and you can get a very tight looking plant.

To grow into a standard you will pinch out all the side shoots leaving the top 3 or 4 , as the plant grows you pinch out side shoots always leaving the top 3 or 4 to produce the head. The reason we leave the top 3 or 4 is that if we lose the top growing tip by accident or insects eating it we will always have a standard plant. In other words you will end up with a bush on stem. The size of the stem is dictated by you.

To grow as trailers you let the plant grow and trail.

I usually take my cuttings in the spring, March or April, and my plant has grown and flowered by late July or August. Some growers take cuttings later in the year and grow over two years.

At the end of the season I cut back my potted fuchsias to 2 or 3 branches and cover with fleece storing them in a cool room. They can be dampened slightly from time to time, just enough to keep the wood from becoming brittle. In the spring I repot them and feed them and soon they will be producing cuttings to increase my stock.