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Gardening in Scotland with Fuchsias!

The Fuchsia Blether

One Summer holiday (South of England, Hampshire) I met a man called Percy. Percy was a fuchsia man, you know, a fuchsia hobbyist, a fuchsia expert, a fuchsia obsessive, his garden stocked with every conceivable type and variety, so we returned home to the Scottish Highlands with fuchsias by the armful - Alice Hoffman, Mrs. Popple, Eva Boerg, Heinrich Heinkel, Nicola Jane, Winston Churchill, Uncle Charlie and too many others to mention. 

I decided I would grow standard fuchsias, you see, elegant plants with a bare main stem, three or four foot in height and topped with a canopy of delicate leaves and flowers, umbrella-like in appearance perhaps if you’ve never seen one before. (Standard fuchsias sell for a fortune, you know, a gold mine if you know what you’re doing)

So we bought a greenhouse, six foot by four, took fuchsia cuttings, potted them and then awaited healthy growth. ‘Standard Fuchsia Man’, that was me!

Fuchsias, of course, are not hardy enough to withstand a raw Highland winter, so a paraffin heater was acquired in anticipation of the frosty nights to come.

Summer passed to Autumn, Autumn to Winter, and hardly a night went by when the heater wasn’t on. I checked them daily, morning and night, to guard against frost damage and sprayed regularly with diluted washing up liquid to keep aphid infestation at bay. Things were looking good.  And then the storm came. Not as bad as the storm of ’87, of course, but powerful enough to inflict considerable damage all the same. The following morning I realized that I’d left the greenhouse door open, barely an inch or so, but enough to blow out five panes of glass. The fuchsias survived but it was a narrow escape.

I should have replaced the glass immediately, of course, I know that now, but more pressing matters demanded my attention. The storm had gusted soot down the chimney and into our front room, you see, so it seemed like a good idea to deal with this problem first.  The chimney needed a good clean, that was all, before further gustings descended upon us.

So I bought rods and a brush from the hardware shop and prepared myself for action.  'Chimney Sweep Man', that was me.  Only I had a problem.  No matter how hard I pushed and prodded the brush wouldn’t go up the chimney. A metal bar - something to do with the back boiler central heating, something like that - blocked my route.

Now a couple of months before I’d watched my neighbour stand on the roof of his house and clean his chimney by feeding the brush down the way.  He must have encountered the same problem as me, I reasoned, obviously, obviously, and so I clambered precariously onto the roof myself, just like him, and shoved my brush down the way. This is not as easy as it sounds, you know, for you have to screw the rods together whilst stuffing the brush down the chimney, and all the while retain a good balance as well.

And so it was then, teetering precariously on the roof, that I detected movement in the greenhouse below.  I didn’t pay it much attention at the time, of course, preoccupied as I was, but later - when checking on the fuchsias - I was met by a devastating sight.  Rabbits!  My fuchsias had been eaten by rabbits!  Still in their pots of course, still recognizable as fuchsias, but chewed, bitten and savaged beyond commercial viability and all because I hadn’t replaced the greenhouse glass immediately.  A disaster, it was, and one that called for vast quantities of home-made wine (pea-pod wine to be exact, a strange alcoholic concoction with a vivid aroma of old sock and mouldy peas) and a philosophical frame of mind to come to terms with.

Anyway, that was to be my one and only venture into the world of standard fuchsias. Now I grow only one type of fuchsia in my garden, the frost hardy Fuchsia ‘Magellanica’ which is capable of withstanding anything that nature can throw at it, even the odd rabbit or two, and  requires little attention beyond a radical spring pruning.

On a different note altogether, did I ever mention my experiences with an industrial sanding machine, I wonder, the type that’s used for sanding wooden floors?  ‘Industrial Sanding Machine Man’, that was me. This was another venture that called for a philosophical frame of mind and vast quantities of home-made wine. The main body of the machine detached itself from the handle, you see, then shot across the lounge floor and demolished a radiator on the far wall. And it wasn’t even my house either, no, but a favour for a lovely old lady in Sutherland. But then that’s another story. I briefly toyed with the notion of becoming a plumber after this incident – ‘Plumber Man’ , that could have been me – but I suspect there’s a lovely old lady in Sutherland (as well as an extremely obliging local plumber) who might think otherwise. Such is life.

By Patrick Vickery  (the gardener who writes – or is it the writer who gardens?)

Copyright Patrick Vickery 2005

History of the Garden Blether

A book about gardening - how to take cuttings successfully