Question

A Franciscan monk named a popular garden plant after Leonhart Fuchs, a 15th century German doctor and herbalist. What plant was it?

Answer 1

Answer:

F.triphylla 

Slender, elegantly arching growth, neat foliage and dainty colourful, but not shrill-toned, pendent flowersare the hallmarks of the fuchsia. Few plants combine these character­istics so successfully or are so easy to grow, hence their popularity as pot plants for the home and greenhouse and as garden decoration.

Most of the fuchsias we grow today are man-made hybrids with fancy names; they are technically known as cultivars ‘ (cultivated varieties) to distinguish them from genuinely wild varieties. Thousands of cultivars have been raised during the past 150 years and it says much for the standards of the early breed­ers that there are today vintage fuchsias of 100 years old or more rubbing shoulders with the most recently produced ones. The same cannot be said, for example, of chrysanthemums and dahlias. These many fuchsia cultivars are derived from a mere handful of wild species. This is somewhat surprising when one realises how varied this large genus is. About 100 species are known, most of them from Mexico, south to Chile, but there are a few in the West Indies, Tahiti and New Zealand. A wide range of growth form is found, from small carpeters like F.procumbens to the tree-sized F.excorticata. Most species are shrubs, some evergreen, others de­ciduous. A few have tubers like a dahlia and some are epiphytic on mossy rocks and trees.

The first fuchsia to be named was F.triphylla. It was found on the West Indian Island of San Domingo (Haiti) by Father Charles Plumier (1646-1704), a French Franciscan monk, traveller and botanist. This intrepid missionary had, by 1690, visited several of the West Indian Islands recording the plants he saw with remarkably accurate drawings. He also revived the old custom of naming new plant genera after peo­ple, choosing Leonhart Fuchs to per­petuate the fuchsia. Fuchs (1501-66) was a German doctor/herbalist who held the Chair of Medicine at Tubingen University from 1535 to his death in 1566. Apart from Fuch­sia, he is best remembered today forhis Herbal which is embellished with some excellent woodcut illustrations.