Is it Fuschia or Fuchsia?
Is it Fuschia or Fuchsia?
So which plant is it? If you look up the first instance, with the “s” before the “ch”, Webster will tell you that it is definitely wrong. In fact, as I write this, Word has underlined F-U-S-C-H-I-A in the red wavy line that tells me it is incorrect, while the spelling F-U-C-H-S-I-A, has not been marked for correction.
That should be all the proof you need, and yet there is a battle constantly waged over this issue across back yard fences and in local gardening circles around the world! There is, however, no confusion (okay, just a little) over its pronunciation. The most common pronunciation is FEW-she-uh, while some of us tend to run it all together, saying FEW-sha, and still others pronounce it FEWK-see-uh. We, by the way, have got the run-together version and a new one, FOOKS-ee-uh, listed in our description, derived from some botany pronunciation guide or other. I’m afraid the original pronunciation has been lost to time. And the truth is, that regardless of how you spell it—Fuchsia Plant or Fuschia Plant, everyone is going to know what you are talking about anyway!
We are here, though, to set the record straight, at least insofar as the proper spelling goes. The proper spelling is with the ‘CH’ before the ‘S’. The reason for this is that the Fuchsia plant was named after Leonhart (or Leonhard) Fuchs who was one of the founding fathers of botany (and I can find no phonetic pronunciation for his name). A very well-known German physician, at least in the 16th century, he created the first medicinal garden at the University of Tubingen in 1535. The Fuchsia, which bears his name, was discovered on Santo Domingo in the Caribbean in 1696 or 1697(record-keeping at that time left much to be desired) by French scientist Dom Charles Plumier. Okay, this is probably where the original confusion started—a French scientist named a tropical plant after a German botanist.
So, there you have it! Webster describes the fuchsia as “ any of a genus (Fuchsia) of ornamental shrubs of the evening-primrose family having showy nodding flowers usually in deep pinks, reds, and purples”. Most of us though, just call them beautiful! Maybe we should just take a clue from Shakespeare and know that “a fuchsia by any other name, would smell just as sweet” and just enjoy the flower, not worrying about whether it’s spelled it Fuchsia or Fuschia.
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