British Columbia: Fuchsia boliviana and iochroma fuchsioides

A few years ago I posted a few messages about fuchsia boliviana that I was trying to grow from seed in Vancouver, 5 km from the Botanical Garden. In the end I have 2 plants, one "alba" and one regular, each now about 5' tall.

They stay in the greenhouse over the winter and spend the summer on my North facing porch, getting sun part of the day. I water them well and fertilize them every so often.

My question arises from the fact that this year they hardly bloomed. The alba has not bloomed at all, the other produced about a half dozen groups of flowers but is clearly not going to produce any more since it has fruited. Yet last year they generated LOTS of flowers.

Does anyone have any idea why I did not get any flowers this year?

Perhaps along the same lines, I grew an iochroma fuchsioides from seed last year, and this year it grew like mad and has reached 6' in height; it is right next to the fuchsia - and it too shows no signs of blooming. Yet I read that it should be absolutely covered with flowers all season long ...

 

For the Fuchsia - did you prune it at all at the end of last season? If you did, you might see reduced blooming this year. Even in the wild they'll stop blooming if branches break.

For the Iochroma, it might be a soil issue. Most of the Solanums from Latin America like a slightly more depleted soil, so you might have actually overfertilized, even with a sporadic regimen (as odd as that might sound.)

 

I thinned the fuchsia this spring, so that may have been it. But that raises this issue: my greenouse is only 8' tall, and the fuchsia will reach that height next year, and so every year from then on I will have to trim them. Does that mean that every year they will respond by producing few flowers? Not worth growing them if that is the case ....

I will see how the Iochroma goes. I cut it down to about 1' last winter and it has grown quite rapidly this year; rather than putting it in the greenhouse over winter I might be able to put it in the house although we have too few windows for it to get a great deal of light.

 

I'm puzzled by the remark that pruning could affect blossoming of the Fuchsias. I have three varieties of hardy Fuchsias outside, and these die back almost to their roots every winter. So I prune off all of the dead wood; and yet, every year new branches emerge from the ground and produce blossoms prolifically. Are the tropical Fuchsias so different that they are adversely affected by pruning?

 

Yes. Tropical Fuchsias are wired to grow year-round, and almost all species (in Ecuador at least, where the rate of endemicism in Fuschia is very high) are adversely affected by the loss of anything more than the obsolete leaves and minor twigs. In my experience, in the process of pruning them you take off the new growth that's about to flower, and you end up setting the plant back a great deal while it produces more new growth rather than flowers.

There are miles of difference between the low-growing cold-hardy hybrids originally developed for British gardens and the original tree stock they came from. Soccerdad is growing original species, and hence they have quite different needs.

 

Here is a picture of the Iochroma, with a figure for scale. It has grown like mad lately, evidently loving our current temperatures of about 8 - 10 c at night.

Somethings - new branches - are now growing in every leaf axil.

Anyway, it will be too tall for my greenhouse before long. Will there be any adverse effects if I cut it off at, say, its midpoint?

 

Should be just fine - and if you do that, you can root the cuttings. The worst that will happen is that it will stimulate a whole bunch of lateral branching, but since you're growing it in a greenhouse I can't see that being a bad thing.

 

Thanks. It would be sooo nice to have a larger or taller greenhouse, but one must make do with what they have. My 8' tall banana, the object of admiration by all who see her, will have to go into the compost when winter arrives...

 

She can't come indoors with you for the winter?

 

I have a wife, 4 daughters and 8' ceilings. There is no room for her.