Fuchsia disaster - help

[brogueish]

Our garden has an old and top-heavy fuschia bush - around 8 foot tall and growing next to a boundary wall, but this year has been hit by fuchsia gall mite. As per online advice, I removed all of the affected branches yesterday but now all we are left with is woody and largely rotten trunk and branches. The plant was here when we moved in and talking to the neighbours, it's close to 30 years old so it has had a good life.

I think our options are:
Spray with bugkiller and hope it comes back next year mite-free
Plant something else to climb through the skeleton (having killed the fuchsia?)
Remove it entirely and plant something else in the spot

I don't know what to do for the best. We don't have a big garden and the fuchsia was a real draw when we bought the house so I'm sad to lose it, but it sounds like once the mite takes hold it's almost impossible to treat.

Would really welcome advice from more green-fingered folk please. Removing it feels so drastic

Argh. I've been looking at the RHS advice on fuchsia gall mite, which has confirmed my suspicions that that's what's afflicting my fuchsia magellanica.

The RHS says Bugclear and the like won't work, so with mine I'm just cutting off the afflicted growth (I binned the last prunings but will burn the next) and hoping for the best. If yours is a fuchsia magellanica too - which its age and size suggest it probably is - they do cope well with a drastic prune, so it may not be dead. You could plant a smallish clematis to grow up the remaining framework and mentally prepare yourself for hoiking out the plant next year if you haven't managed to get rid of the mites.

Yes, that looks like the one - it's so sad, it should have been covered with flowers now and instead it was all warped and gnarled looking.

I came across an ingredient that was said might help - abamectin - but I can't find anything that actually contains it. I suspect the mild winters have made a difference, I read that cold winters can kill off the mites.

Given the extent of the affected growth I just can't imagine that the mites are gone. The clematis is a lovely idea, thanks. We are constantly battling with rampant passionflower in this area so I forget that there are other, better behaved climbers.

Good luck with treating yours, it sounds as though you've caught it much earlier so I hope you can eradicate them.

I don't know. I've just had a grubby time, pulling the prunings out of the compost heap and burning them. I think I've removed all the distorted bits, but how many mites that's left behind, I can't tell. I was just thinking a few days ago that this fuchsia is one of the unsung heroes of my garden - flowers for months, making a great heap of colour - and I hadn't twigged what a big deal this infestation might be. I'm trying to be ruthless because I've got lots of other perennial fuchsias that I'd be sad to lose, too.

And, yes, I know from experience that planting passionflower on anything but a long fence can bring as many problems as it solves!