Derek wrote:
On Fri, 5 Aug 2016 20:06:32 +0100, "Phil L"
wrote:

Three from six of my Sir Matt Busbys have all but died - they all
started off with a profusion of flowers and I've been dead-heading
them all the same, three have stopped producing while the other
three are producing even more.

Its quite possible that they have finished their flowering, so cut the
fuchsia down by two thirds, water and feed, and they may well be
flowing again by October. A grower I know opens his garden for the NGS
in June where he has 150 varieties of fuchsia on show, day after, cuts
down all the plants by a third, de leaves them (that's a mammoth job)
and they are all back for his Autumn NGS open day!

one of them has battered and bruised leaves, as does another
completely red fuchsia that I don't know the name of, the leaves
appear to have been shot with a shotgun, thousands of tiny holes,
some joined to other holes.

Have you checked at night? Do as I say above, its very difficult to
kill a fuchsia (expect possibly with kindness)

I have grown 'Sir Matt Busbys' not a great fan, suggest if you see a
fuchsia with a celebrity name, you leave it alone, there are over
11,000 different varieties

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Cheers for the info Derek. My keyboard died as I was typing and I'd no time
last night to source new batteries.

I've taken a few leaves off and checked under a magnifying glass, there does
appear to be insect activity, droppings and obvious trails of bite holes but
no actual bugs.

I'll cut down the affected ones by two thirds and de-leave them, but still
can't work out why these seem to have finished while others bought at the
same time are still producing masses of blooms, not just the pest ridden
ones but a few others too that show no sign of infestation.

SMB was purchased solely because I wanted red and white hanging to go with
upright Snowcaps in the same baskets. I'm not an expert in any way (as you
may have noticed!) but my cunning plan was to have the red and white
Snowcaps in the middle with SMB around the edges to create a sort of 'ball'
of red and white. They've turned out pretty good and I've taken dozens of
cuttings of both plus quite a few others successfully following your advice
from last year.