MY eight-year-old daughter has recently been looking at plants and how they grow in a science project at school. They have planted nasturtium and sunflower seeds, examined the parts of a plant and visited Askham Bryan College where they planted sweet pea seeds and took a fuchsia cutting.

During half term she also brought home the fuchsia her group had been looking after, a responsibility she took very seriously, watering it daily and taking a photograph of the first flower as it opened.

Since then she has become increasingly interested in our garden, following me around and wanting to prune and plant and asking a never-ending stream of questions.

Our garden is very small and crammed so it is impossible to allocate her a space for her own patch. Instead we have started a collection of fuchsias for her to care for. These are perfect plants for a child, because they are easy to buy, there are many varieties, they root easily from cuttings and they have very attractive flowers.

Her collection numbers six so far, all trailing varieties, together with the unnamed cutting she brought home from her trip.

Pink la Campanella has pink sepals with a dark pink corolla while trailing Tom West has lovely large pale-green, pink-and-white variegated leaves. He hasn't flowered yet but the picture on the label looks as if the blooms will have red or dark pink sepals and a purple corolla.

Red Spider, developed in the USA in 1946, has crimson sepals and red corolla and Huntsman has double flowers with red sepals and purple corolla.

Coachman is quite an old variety developed in the UK in the early 1920s by a grower called Bright. It has medium-sized, rather dainty salmon-pink and vermilion flowers that open relatively early on a mature plant. Eva Boerg is more flamboyant with white sepals and a rich, reddish-purple corolla.

The above fuchsias are not hardy so we will have to bring them indoors to over-winter or risk keeping them outside in a sheltered place by the house wall.

A thick mulch and wrapping of bubble wrap for insulation may be enough to get them through the cold weather. Although I would risk this approach for my own plants, my daughter will probably need to be more certain of their survival.

Whatever we decide, a few cuttings will be taken to ensure the continuation of the collection next year.

Updated: 09:04 Saturday, June 29, 2002