If you are a child, there are three obvious things to do with fuchsia flowers. One, gently pop open the inflated buds to reveal the petals inside. Two, remove the stigma and six of the eight stamens to make a pin-headed ballerina doll; and three, send her to the guillotine and suck the sweet nectar from her neck.
I'm sure it's the fuchsia family's high entertainment value that is at the root of its popularity among people of all ages. After all, there are not many plants that swell the heart with sentiment - as do the fuchsia hedgerows of the west and southwest with their spills of crimson bells - at the same time as being exceptionally good fun. The hedging fuchsia, F. magellanica - the distinctive "Irish" plant captured as the essence of this country on so many tourist snapshots - is, as any plantsperson knows, a foreign interloper. The hardy, salt-resistant variety `Riccartonii' arrived here from Britain sometime around the middle of the last century, but its parent species originated in the cooler parts of South America.
The genus Fuchsia, which comprises 105 species and many thousands of cultivars, was named to honour Leonhart Fuchs, a 16th century German herbalist, physician and botanical illustrator - and if you've any smattering of the Teutonic tongue, then you'll know that the "ch" should be pronounced as a hard "k". But that makes the uttering of this beautiful flower's name a potential embarrassment, so perhaps it's best to stick with the incorrect, but soft, "few-shia". Or if you're feeling particularly mellifluous, you could try the folk name Lady's Eardrops, or the west of Ireland's "deora De" meaning, dolefully, "God's Teardrops".
I've been familiar with the eardrops alias for years, but being a townie, I only recently learned of the teardrop name when reading a piece by Nick Egan in the Irish Fuchsia Society's summer newsletter. Egan, who grows "near 300 varieties at last count" is vicechairman of the society, as well as being a British Fuchsia Society accredited judge and the Irish delegate for Eurofuchsia. His adolescent children, typically unmoved by these qualifications, have another irreverent title for him, not printable in this column.
Egan's collecting mania caught hold of him more than 10 years ago. Before that, he'd grown just three types: the red-and-purple `Beacon' , the scarlet-flowered tubular `Thalia' and `Lena', with white-and-pink flouncy skirts. His first ones came as cuttings from his grandfather's plants, "He always had a fuchsia in the garden". The fuchsia fascination must run in the family, because Egan's 12-year-old daughter, Nicola, is already showing an interest. She is preening three plants for a show, and her new six-foot by eight-foot greenhouse is being constructed in the back garden, alongside her father's much bigger new greenhouse.
A glasshouse or polytunnel is necessary for overwintering tender fuchsias where they are kept barely moist during the cold months: "just a few drops of water around the soil near the stem to keep it from becoming dustdry." Some of the least hardy, but most beautiful, are the triphylla types (including the lovely `Thalia' and its salmon-coloured cousin `Coralle'), bred from F. triphylla, a native of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.
And one of the newest fuchsias on the market is the first-ever variegated triphylla. `Firecracker' has boldly-marked cream, pink and red leaves. Naturally, Egan has one, and "although you shouldn't let fuchsias flower if you're growing them for the foliage" (it dulls the leaves) he's allowing a cluster of buds to elongate and eventually bloom, "just to see what they're like".
Another one that "everyone's going mad for" is `Baby Bright', with palest pink porcelain sepals and petals and rich pink stamens, a small-flowered type that makes an excellent container plant. It's the kind of fuchsia that appears on the show bench as a perfect pincushion of tight, bushy growth, studded with scores of flowers. Not so easy to achieve though: this level of competitive growing involves timely pinching out of shoots, careful feeding with different supplements at different periods, and rotating the pots 180 degrees twice a week to form even growth.
Meanwhile, trailing varieties grown for exhibition are liable to have wayward, upright shoots weighed down with wooden clothes pegs ("don't use plastic ones: they're not heavy enough"). The main enemy of fuchsias - along with that dreadful horde that includes rust, botrytis, red spider mite, whitefly and aphids - is the vine weevil. Nick Egan hunts them avidly, checking all the pots twice a year for the grubs. He has also used nematodes (good-guy eelworms that prey specifically on vine-weevil) to good effect: "That put a halt to their gallop!"
But there is another creature that causes damage to the blooms of show fuchsias. Surprisingly, most gardeners' best busy buddy, the bee, is not welcome in the fuchsia collection. Apparently, its tiny bristly feet leave unlovely footprints all over the petals.
For details of membership of the Irish Fuchsia Society, which costs £5 per year, contact Nick Egan at (01) 8351836.
See fuchsias and many other competitively-grown plants next weekend (Saturday, 3 - 6.30 p.m. and Sunday, 2 - 5 p.m.) at Dublin Five Horticultural Society "Garden Vista Show", Chanel College, Coolock, Dublin 5.
Irish Fuchsia Society annual show: September 4th (2 - 5 p.m.) and 5th (1.30 - 5 p.m.) at Hillmount Nursery Centre, 56-58 Upper Braniel Road, Gilnahirk, Belfast, BT5 7TX.