Celebrate the fuchsia

Gaura lindheimeri 'Rosyjane'

Fuchsia 'Gota'

Dave Green's display

Dianella tasmanica 'Emerald Arch'

Gladiolus 'Antica'

More than 23,000 visitors came to see displays from growers and nurseries around the country, and the show also hosted the British Fuchsia Society’s 70th anniversary celebrations.

Highlights included some exquisite species pelargoniums from Chris Cooke Plants (Gloucestershire). Hardy‘s Cottage Garden Plants (Hampshire) created a show garden packed with bright summer colour, including the new release Gaura lindheimeri 'Rosyjane', the first cultivar with bicoloured flowers. There was also a fine display of cut-and-come again salad leaves from the Wisley Trials Department - including some unusual leaves like purple radish and perilla.

The star of the show, however, was the fuchsia. The British Fuchsia Society held its main annual competition over the three days of the show, and there were also over 20 display stands created by regional groups of the British Fuchsia Society and individual specialists like Trevor Strickland, who breeds miniature fuchsias. He was showing two newly-bred cultivars: Fuchsia 'Ballerina Girl', with an upright habit and tiny orange-tinted flowers, and the exquisite F. 'Lilac Mist', an open, airy plant whose pale lilac flowers are no more than 5mm (1/4in) long. Another new variety, shown by the Harrow Fuchsia Society, was F. 'Gota', a Dutch-bred plant released last year: its flowers have a wine-red corolla and mid-pink sepals which, unlike most fuchsias, are held upright.

Yorkshireman Dave Green has travelled widely in South America to track down a comprehensive range of species fuchsias, and says he likes to see a plant growing naturally. His vividly colourful display stand reflected this, placing his fuchsias among other South American plants. Species fuchsias such as Fuchsia boliviana, with its lax, almost felty leaves, were shown against orchids, Tillandsia and tricoloured shrub verbena (Lantana camara).

Away from the fuchsias, Oak Tree Nursery (North Yorkshire) won silver-gilt with their display of South African grasses. These included several cultivars of Dianella - a member of the Phormium family with strappy leaves and delicate blue flowers, followed by large plum-coloured berries. Cliff Plowes, who runs the nursery with his wife Gill, says he is very impressed by this Australasian plant: he has found it hardy to at least -6°C (it is said to withstand -12°C) and he says it bears flowers or berries from late spring to late summer. Dianella tasmanica 'Emerald Arch' is the largest cultivar he stocks, a robust plant hung liberally with berries the size of grapes; but this year he is also introducing the more lax cultivar ‘Utopia’, with dark blue flowers, which grows to only 50cms and has curiously twisted foliage.

Other highlights were the spectacular display of Gladiolus from Devine Nurseries (East Yorkshire): these lovely flowers have recently become fashionable again, thanks to new cultivars in unusual colours such as 'Antica', in burnt-orange fading to purple, a new introduction from Devine this year. Other good colours were 'Zorro', in sultry dark red, and 'Greenstar', a vibrant lime green. Also in a particularly stunning shade of green were shaggy-petalled Chrysanthemum 'Shamrock Green' and C. 'Froggy Green', with tighter pincushion-like flowers, both shown by Silver-Gilt winning Oska Copperfield Nursery (Leicestershire).

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Words and photos: Sally Nex