Please help - Why is my Fuchsia dying?!

Afternoon and Happy Easter!

i recently planted 2 Fuchsia plants at the front of the house and for some reason they are slowly dying .

i have attached some pics and the plants were the same size when i bought them (no growth) but now looks a lot worse!

at first i thought i maybe over watered them (especially as i have pebble coverage on the ground) but they just havent recovered and after reading, im worried it may be verticillium wilt.

An anyone please offer any help/advice?

Thanks in advance
chris

 

Hi Chris,
whereabouts are you? Fuchsias should not really be flowering this early, so your plants have been grown in a greenhouse and are used to stable, high temperatures. Planting them out has probably been a shock to them.

I'd suggest to prune them quite hard, if they are suffering from the cold they will lose the greenhouse grown flowers and leaves anyway. Then just sit back and hope for the best. In a month or so they are hopefully putting on a lot of new growth.

Very nice colour flowers, they will be so perfect later in the summer.

 

Agree with Selleri ....nailed it exactly

 

Thanks very much for your feedback and advice @Selleri - much appreciated! Im in West Yorks. It does make sense now you say and ill live and learn, i should have probably acclimatized the plants outside first rather than planting immediately.

So just prune them right down, even if that means taking most of the flowers/leaves/branches etc? I was worried about doing that as they are newly planted a few weeks back.

Im glad they still stand a fighting chance!

 

I wouldn't prune them as the wood might still be alive. Just gently bend the stems and see if they spring back or if they snap. If they snap they're dead wood if not they'll re-shoot.
EDIT.... Looking closer at the photos there are a lot of new shoots growing, you don't want to cut these put as they will grow ready acclimatised.

 

Fuchsias will flower all year round. In fact Summer is their least season for flowering. They do not like sun and they do not like temperatures above 20 deg. The main flowering time for Fuchsias in the UK is from Setember through to November and mine regularly go through to the end of January.

 

Which is why I only have a couple in the garden, they seem to hate summer.

Think I'd just leave them, wait for new growth to appear and cut back anything dead in a month or two.

 

This is one of mine now ( a standard waiting to go outside ) " Evita "..... been flowering for about a month or so now.

 

Pete, well they love it here
Fuchsias make massive shrubs but cut back they will produce flowers continuously from mid summer to late autumn.
Tender fuchsias have survived outside over the winter too.
Yes GardeningNewbie, they will prob be just fine in a few weeks but all plants bought from an indoor environment need to be hardened off before planting out in the garden

 

Hi,

You do not say exactly how long since you planted them out, but with the last few days being so hot it looks like they are dying of sunburn ! plus if you put them out a week ago, they could have been frosted as we did have a few cold nights as well.

As they look like they are in full sun (? ) and you have them up against a stone wall and covered the soil with gravel so they will act like a heat sink and almost cook the plants in todays temperatures.

As said above, many of the fancier doubles are much better in a semi shaded area with moist soil and other plants around them.

I would move them to a shadier site and if frost is forecast cover them with fleece overnight.
Remove the flowers and larger flower buds so it diverts its energy into producing new shoots/leaves as the old ones will all probably drop off, eventually.
Also keep a check for greenfly as they readily move in on a damaged plant.

hth

 

One of my Fuchsias, more of an oddity really, but that's why I grow it, it also flowers now, but the flowers are very small.
Fuchsia excorticata. The flowers just form out of the branches at this time of the year, it's about 12 ft tall but would have been three times that height by now if I hadn't pruned it hard over the years.

 

One of my favourites Pete, although I haven't grown it for a few years.