For more than 50 years, fuchsia has been a favorite of Sebastopol gardener

Carlyss Van Ness remembers the first one. She spotted it at a nursery near Freestone - a flowering plant so pretty it simply had to come home with her.

That was 1970. She has babied that plant for more than 50 years and it still has an honored spot in her own secret garden. Over the decades 150 to 200 other fuchsias have since joined the first one on the same Sebastopol property where she first moved the same year she got bitten by the fuchsia bug.

The retired schoolteacher rarely keeps more than one of any variety, preferring to fill her multitude of gardens, each wit its own theme, with singular surprises.

There is one exception: ‘Pink Rain.’ Its showy rose and purple flowers fall like a spring shower from dark green ovate leaves in an easy way she finds irresistible.

But Van Ness has plenty of love to spread around among the multitude of other enchanting fuchsias crowded into the garden she calls the “Fuchsia Dell.” Vibrantly colored fuchsias line the fence, cluster tightly in raised beds and drape like fancy earrings from pots hanging from the rafters of a gazebo. The sheer number in bloom creates quite a spectacle.

Mid summer is the peak bloom time for many fuchsias, making it the perfect time to plant a few to add some pizazz to a garden starting to look a little peaked from the heat.

Van Ness is a member of the Sebastopol Fuchsia Society, a group at least as old as her oldest fuchsia. And every July members pot up plants, most of which they have cultivated from their own cuttings, and throw a big sale. This year’s blow out is at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts on Saturday. While the official hours are 9 a.m. to noon, the group frequently runs out of plants before closing time.

“People usually are lined up before nine,” said member Elise Groves, who is overseeing the sale.

The group runs through a lot of plants in a few hours. They’ll have 150 different varieties of fuchsia and 350 plants in all. That means there won’t be multiples of many of the varieties so discriminating buyers, particularly those on a mission to snag a particular favorite, know to come early for the best selection. Prices are a bargain at $8 a gallon or $12 for a hanging basket. And that purchase comes with service. Fuchsia Society members will be on hand to answer questions about care and feeding of and carts will be available to help people transport their purchases to their cars.

Not every plant will be in bloom. But club members are printing photographs of each variety in bloom so shoppers will know their shape, size and color - what they will look like in all their glory.

Fuchsias come in varying shades of pink, red, purple and white or combinations of the two, with different shades of each. Fuchsia flowers have three parts: an upper tube, a sepal beneath that points out like wings or a petal and the corolla, which are the real petals, arrayed beneath the sepal like a skirt. In some varieties each part is a different color, like red and white, or red and purple, making for some striking combinations. They come in a zies from tiny, delicate little flowers (Van Ness’s favorite) to big show-offs like Pink Marshmallow with its light pink corollas and blushing light-pink sepals on a white marshmallow background and Moonglow, which has white sepals tinged with peach.

Groves joined the group after happening upon one of their sales 2012 with her mother. Until then she would buy baskets of them at Home Depot or the old Yardbirds. But after the plants had bloomed and died back in winter she assumed they were an annual and tossed them. After hitting the sale she learned that wasn’t the case. A fuchsia can live for decades. She experimented by putting the plants in hanging pot in the ground.’

“They’ve done fantastic,” said the mortgage broker, who lives in Santa Rosa’s Bennett Valley and boasts a yard full of these fancy looking shrubs. She now knows to cut them way back in late January or February for their best bloom. After her first sale purchase, Groves returned to the sale the following year and joined the club, which has about 25 members, 15 of them core enthusiasts who show up for monthly meetings to trade cuttings, learn pruning techniques from experts like Van Ness and to talk with like minded lovers of fuchsias.

Fuchsiafinder.com, a comprehensive online database, has documented information about 17,000 native species of fuchsias and cultivars. Van Ness has both in her Fuchsia Dell. Among the cultivars are a couple hybridized by Dr. Peter Bayes, a master hybridizer from The North Coast. ‘Mendonoma Belle’ is a big bushy shrub with exuberant 2- inch purple and magenta flowers with a long bloom. Another popular Bayes introduction is ‘Trailing Starcross’ with bell-like flowers in two shades of pink. Both are resistant to gall mites, tiny sap-sucking pests that can cause a variety of unsightly and abnormal growths on fuchsias and other plants.

Another fuchsia pest is the white fly. Groves said she suffered an invasion but was able to beat them back with a spray made of 70% alcohol to 30% water with a dab of soap. Organic Neem Oil that can be purchased at garden centers, also is effective against white flies, she said.

While many fuchsia do like regular summer irrigation, which can be a challenge in California’s summer dry climate, they are attractive to hummingbirds and pollinators. Van Ness’s Fuchsia dell, set among the dappled light surrounded by redwoods, are buzzing with bees.

Fuchsia may get a bad rap as fussy plants. But Van Ness said that is not so.

“They’re not as delicate as they look. They’re very hardy,” she said. “If you put them in the ground they usually get even bigger and hardier. We also have these natural thoughts that fuchsia have to be in the shade. They really don’t. There are plenty of them that will grow in full sun.”

Fuchsia prefer loamy soil, the soil natural to the Sebastopol area. But gophers also like it. Van Ness said she heads off the invaders by planting all of in ground fuchsias in cages.

For more information about planting, watering and maintaining fuchsia check out the Mendocino Botanical Gardens website at pdne.ws/3A6sLpm. The gardens have an extensive collection of a dozens of different fuchsia, many in bloom now.

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 707-521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.