Native Fuchsia obscure but Wilsons Grevillea a cop out

I post this as much for the painterly image above as for the plant itself. You'll find this rosy-flowered species growing naturally on the sands and gravels north of Bunbury, in Western Australia. So rosy, that my camera struggled in the Australian Garden at Cranbourne to get the colour-balance sorted. You know what reds are like to photograph.

This is Grevillea wilsonii, commonly known as Native Fuchsia, or sometimes less imaginatively, Wilson's Grevillea. Although Fuchsia, as you will no doubt be aware, is a quite different looking plant, and flower, and is not native to Australia; there are a couple of Fuchsia species in New Zealand but mostly they are found in Central and South America.

Native Fucshia is also a name applied to other Australian plants, such as many species of Eremophila (aka Emu Bush), which have flowers more closely resembling those of a true Fuchsia. A better match still are the flowers of many Correa species, and yes, they are too sometimes called Native Fuchsia. For what it's worth, none of these genera - Grevillea, Eremophila, Correa and Fuchsia - are closely related and each is in a different plant family. 

But back to today's Native Fuchsia. Its genu Grevillea is found almost entirely in Australia, with just a handful of species in nearby islands such as Papua-New Guinea, New Caledonia and Sulawesi. Of the more than 350 species of Grevillea in Australia, over half grow naturally in Western Australia.

This Native Fuchsia, as I said, is from north of Bunbury, on the Swan River plain in south-west Western Australia. That's also where you'll find many other Grevillea species. This particular one grows in Jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) forests or woodland on the iron-rich (lateritic) soils south of Perth.

I don't know that the flowers of this species are more (or less) like a Fuchsia than any other Grevillea but they are more separated in the flower cluster so perhaps that inspired the comparison. Or maybe it's just the bright red colour - so difficult to capture in pixels - of the flowers. 

The botanical name honours the surgeon Dr Thomas Wilson, who made nine voyages from the UK to Australia on convict ships, saving convict lives through his prescription of cleanliness, lime juice and wine. On one of these trips, in 1829, he stopped off at Swan River and collected plants for botanist Allan Cunningham in Sydney. It was Cunningham (briefly Director of Sydney's Botanic Gardens) who honoured him in the species epithet.

In nature, as on Howson Hill in the Australian Garden at Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne, Native Fuchsia is a sprawling shrub, with tangled foliage, up to about a metre tall. And like many grevilleas, it has a long flowering period, often from June through to December. These pictures were taken in early November.

If you want to grow Native Fuchsia from seed, you should remove or break the seed coat and add smoke or smoke water. Otherwise, it can be grown from cuttings or grafted onto a robust rootstock. A hybrid with (the yes, unimaginatively named) Johnson's Grevillea, Grevillea johnsonii, is called 'Bon Accord' is sold as a grafted plant.