Zipporah's fuchsia
Friday, November 15, 2024
On the Fuchsia Trail. Humboldt County, California. Ferndale on the Eel River.
In 1852, 13-year-old Zipporah Patrick Russ went West with her family in two covered wagons. The Patrick Family started in Maine, passed through Illinois, and then were to head to the Pacific Northwest on the Oregon Trail.
Unfortunately they arrived at Fort Laramie, Wyoming too late in the season and passes through the Cascade Mountains were soon to be blocked by snows. Not to be delayed on their long trek, they did the next best thing and headed south to Sacramento, California. Eventually the family’s long journey West ended in Humboldt County, on the Eel River near Ferndale, California.
What’s amazing is that young Zipporah carried a potted Fuchsia magellanica with her on a wagon trip that covered twenty miles a day and took five months! All the way from Maine actually. How she managed to keep it alive all that time is probably even more amazing. This was one detained girl!
Her daughter Georgia Russ Williams would later put her mother’s reminiscences to poetry.
"Delightsome is a garden, Here joy I had in mine.The treasured slips I planted luxuriantly grew. All sweet old-fashioned flowers, We loved and knew."
Of course, she was writing about her mother’s fuchsia as well.
The original plant is long gone but cuttings were taken and Zipporah’s Fuchsia survives in other spots. Unfortunately, Auculops fuchsiae, the fuchsia gall mite from Brazil, was accidentally introduced into the San Francisco Bay Area in about 1982.
Fuchsia magellanica, native to Southern Argentina and Chile, is unfortunately highly susceptible to the disfiguring effects of these minute mites. Unlike its Brazilian fuchsia cousins in the Quelusia Section of the genus, it never evolved any resistance to the depredations of the mites.
Ferndale had its heyday in the late 19th century and preserves many quaint Victorian buildings despite the occasional strong earthquakes or catastrophic flood. Alas, the descendants of Zipporah’s treasured slip are still there about Ferndale but haven’t fared quite so well under the mites’ disfiguring assaults as they did against earthquakes and floods!
