| LemonGrassM, I wish I could help ID your Fuchsia, but there are many THOUSANDS of registered Fuchsias. It's particularly hard to tell from unopened buds, or viewing from the top without being able to see the corollas. It's also hard without a clearcut sense of scale. Of the thousands of named Fuchsias, many of them are similar. The majority of registered names are not particularly distinctive, despite pleas from the American Fuchsia society to stop registering non-descript Fuchsias. Some Fuchsias have several names, and some Fuchsias exist in the trade with the wrong names. >>I'm new with this plant so I'm not sure how to prune/trim this plant This I can help you with. It depends on what you want to do with it. You can let it grow as-is, or you can train it. If you train it, then what you want to train it as will determine how to prune it. For example, if you wanted a standard, you would leave a strong upright stem and trim out all others, and pinch the top once you wanted it to start branching. For a fan you would select several stems aligned on a plane and pinch out any shoots going in the wrong direction. I'm not sure how to do a cascade and yours is probably not quite trailing enough. If you want you can "deadhead" meaning just trim off the berries after the flowers bloom. >> since it seems floppy, and all over the place. Fuchsias are usually naturally upright, but some have been intentionally bred for floppy stems so as to grow them in hanging baskets, and others, including probably yours, with weak, "semi-trailing" stems to make them easier to train as standards ("lolipop trees") or other shapes. >> Would a pot be better home for it than a spot on the ground? Not necessarily. Especially in your climate, where freezes are probably rare or non-existent, you could train it as a standard if you wanted, and not worry about the top freezing off. It looks like the previous grower staked it, and that probably means that it will need to be staked especially if grown in the ground. No matter what you do with it, unless it produces stronger shoots you'll probably want to stake it, and you'll need a bigger, and fairly sturdy, stake. |
