Brilliant fuchsia

About the plant

Fuchsias had been grown in England since the 1780s, but they were the small-flowered hardy species of Chile and Brazil, and nobody was prepared for this one. Fuchsia fulgens grows in the mountains of central Mexico, a soft shrub from a tuberous root with big heart-shaped leaves flushed red and, at the ends of the shoots, clusters of hanging flowers ten centimetres long, scarlet tubes tipped with green. De Candolle had named it in 1828 from the Spanish botanists' drawings; the living plant reached England in 1837, and when it flowered at Hugh Low's nursery at Clapton the next summer Paxton sent his artist to draw it.

Within a few years it had been crossed with the hardy Fuchsia magellanica, and the hybrids were the beginning of the big garden fuchsias, in every combination of red, white and purple, that filled Victorian conservatories and now fill hanging baskets. In Mexico the flowers are built for hummingbirds, the only visitors able to reach the nectar at the base of the tube, and the plant follows the birds up the mountains. Paxton's plate shows a flowering shoot at natural size, coloured by hand in the scarlet that gave the species its name.