Beautiful Flowering Shrubs 



Our knowledge of the Fuchsia is chiefly rounded by 

 the nineteenth century. The story goes that quite late 

 in the eighteenth century, James Lee, the well-known 

 Hammersmith nurseryman, was walking down a street 

 when he saw in a cottage window a new and striking 

 plant. Inquiry showed that it had just been brought 

 home by a sailor returning from a cruise in South 

 American waters. It was eagerly bought by the nursery- 

 man, who later made a considerable profit by selling 

 cuttings of the plant at high prices. Kew seems to have 

 had its first Fuchsia from a Captain Firth in 1788, 

 who got it in Chile; at that time Kew and the nursery- 

 man considered Fuchsias to be purely greenhouse plants. 



The genus is native of Mexico and South America 

 Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile and Brazil and was 

 originally named by Linnaeus, to keep the memory 

 green of Leonard Fuchs, a German herbalist, who was 

 born in 1501. He wrote a wonderful " History of 

 Plants," illustrated by many wood-cuts, which is his 

 claim to botanical remembrance. He was a devoted 

 follower of Luther, lived under the patronage of the 

 Duke of Wiirtemberg, the friend of literature, and died 

 at Tubingen in 1560. 



All our garden-shrub Fuchsias have red and purple 

 hanging flowers, the calyx consisting of four thick, red, 

 spreading sepals joined in a tube at the base, the corolla 

 of four purple, overlapping petals forming a bell. High 



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