Daily Photo: The Wonderful Fuchsia

The hardy fuchsia came to the attention of European botanists during the great Age of Exploration, that wonderful period when adventurous souls sailed off to the far corners of the world, battled storms and scurvy, and named just about everything they found after people who were safely tucked up at home.

Which brings us to Ferdinand Magellan, the famous explorer, and Leonhart Fuchs, a 16th-century German botanist. Magellan at least had the adventure credentials, although even he had nothing to do with discovering the plant. Fuchs, meanwhile, never laid eyes on the thing (as far as we know). Yet it was his name that stuck, giving us the fuchsia and securing him a rather unexpected place in botanical history.

It’s a funny sort of immortality, really. You spend your life studying plants, and centuries later your name lives on, attached to one you never actually saw and leaving everybody arguing over how to pronounce the thing. Generations of gardeners have wrestled with the spelling, while others have quietly settled on “few-sha”, hoping nobody will make a fuss at the garden centre.