Family Onagraceae
Charles I'lumier is recorded as finding the first fuchsias in 1703 in San Domingo in the West Indies, which he named Fuchsia tryphylla flore coccinea. The name Fuchsia was in commemoration of Leonhart Fuchs, (1501 -66), a physician and herbalist. Father Charles Plumier, or Pere Plumier, was a distinguished French traveller and botanist, who made three voyages to the West Indies and tropical South America, and in 1703 he published a book dealing with the plants he had discovered in his travels, including the fuchsia he had found.
Haifa century later Linnaeus re-named it Fuchsia tryphylla, as it is known today. As the years passed,
further species were found and added to the genus, but Fuchsia tryphylla was not amongst them and for
over 150 years it was not seen again. In 1873 Thomas Hogg of New York received some seeds from the
West Indies and some nine years later one of the resultant plants came into the hands of Messrs
Henderson & Sons, the London fuchsia specialists at that lime, who sent it to Kew for identification. It was
found to be the long lost Fuchsia tryphylla. The first fuchsia introduced to Great Britain was in 1788, by a Captain Firth, who presented it to the Botanical Gardens at Kew. It is not certain whether this was the species F. coccinea, or F. macrosiemma. The first fuchsias offered commercially were probably by Mr James Lee, a famous nurseryman of Hammersmith in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
