Hidden Valley Hibiscus Forum

Hey all,

My first Dragon Breath Bloom :)

Very cool, Chris! It's a seed setter and has great pollen in case you get tempted!

Charlie

I wish I had something else blooming to cross it with!  I really wanted to cross it to Saffron, but she is just now sending buds again after I cut her back in July!  Do most varieties have a lag time between flowering and growth?  My Belle hasnt had buds on it for a while, and has stopped growing, for the last month, which I am just attributing to the decrease in daylength.   I also want to mention that DB gets about an hour of sun a day and is fully of buds so I think it can tolerated alot more shade and still bloom well :) 

-Chris 

That's an interesting question, Chris, with no set answer. It depends on the variety, and on how much flowering we are talking about and whether the flowers were pollinated and set seed and if anything else happened to stress the plant. I would say that the norm is for rapid growth to be followed by blooming while growth never completely stops for hibiscus. That is what I see in our 6 inch pots that take longer to sell and ship - they keep blooming and growing all along. When they first bud up they could ship in 20 inch high boxes, sometimes less, but later in the summer they are still blooming and need 24 to 30 inch tall boxes. For more mature plants in the ground it is more or less that same - in spring they grow rapidly and then start blooming after which they continue to grow while blooming, but more slowly.

I suspect your Belle is reacting to winter and less light, as you thought. I'm happy to hear that Dragons Breath is able to bud up in just an hour of direct sunlight. My DB is also blooming well inside our office but those windows get several hours of direct sunlight in the winter. Thank goodness in summer the sun is higher in the sky and those windows do not get much if any direct light although smaller windows do get early and then late sun. Our office has turned out to be my best locale for making seeds due to the mild but bright conditions in here. My current greenhouse gets too hot for seedpods to hold but the plants need the heat to grow well in winter and I'm not going to deny it to them just to make seeds.

Charlie

Greetings from the frozen wastelands.

Outside temp is minus 8 at 10:30 AM. however in the morning sun are two beauties.

Louis

Sleeping Beauty

(http://www.imagesct.com/web/list%201%2010/sleeping%20bueaty.jpg)

Bridal Path opening.

(http://www.imagesct.com/web/list%201%2010/bridal%20path.jpg)

Louis, That must be the winter colors of Bridal Path, correct?  It went down to 8 deg here in Dallas, TX

John

hi john, i am not sure of the summer colors of bridal, i only received the plant this past fall.

on this shot, the color deepened the second day.

louis

here a couple of my blooms...bridal path and living legend....going on the 4th day....other blooms shown are beautiful...I love sleeping beauty...I have her too...but still young..looking forward to spring..I am new to this..luv looking at all the beautiful blooms

Beautiful blooms, Motherof4! It looks like they are growing outside - must be in California then since the rest of the country froze and few blooms are seen outside of greenhouses and inside houses right now.

The flower colors show the influence of cooler winter temperatures and less light. Bridal Path shows more intense colors and some shift to more red which it typical of many hibiscus flowers in these conditions. The Living Legend photo shows the unique way that this variety reacts by becoming lighter colored in the same condition and with less red! I've seen this happen even in summer with LL when the plant is grown in deep shade on my porch so I think it must have more to do with lower light in winter than with cooler temperature.

Charlie

yes they are outside...I have several under a couple of trees I have growing in my front yard..and yes I am from rialto ca...in which it was in the 80"s for the last couple of weeks..all of my plants seem to be doing fine...a bloom here and there...I am using your fertilizer...booster and super nova...hopefully I will have plentiful blooms and growth this spring...I am new to this..but I am addicted

Bonnie Lass :)

Any new seedling photos to share Charlie?

I'll check what I have from last summer and fall. In winter I rarely bother to take photos because the colors of the flowers are so intensified and color shifted that they are totally misleading as far as the real colors that the blooms display from spring to fall.

The only people who have flowers in winter are those who have greenhouses that heat up very warm in the daytime due to the greenhouse effect but have cool to cold night temperatures since few if any people can afford to heat their greenhouses above 50F and most just keep it a few degrees above freezing on really cold nights. This causes flower colors to change dramatically over what the typical flower will look like in the normal hibiscus growing seasons.

People who grow hibiscus in the house will usually see more normal looking blooms because we do not let our houses get as cold at night as most greenhouses get, nor as hot during the day. Those extremes are what cause the big shift toward red/blue and intensify the color to what is never seen when blooming in natural outdoor warm weather conditions. If you see such photos know that you will never see those colors unless you, too, grow in a minimally heated greenhouse during the winter.

Chris, your Bonnie Lass bloom is showing amazing color. What were the conditions is has been in? Being in Colorado you obviously experience some very cold weather. Does your apartment temperature fall into the 50's sometimes?

Charlie

Hi Charlie,

I am glad you like the bloom!  It was the only one and will be the only one for a while (I do not see any new buds)  It was about 6 inches across.  I do not like the cold and keep my apartment at a toasty 69 degrees, so it is 69 at night and usually on a sunny day heats up to 75 during the day.  It is pretty nice in the apartment, temperature wise.  I wish I would be getting more blooms, but this spider mite infestation has taken a toll on the plants in the living room.  Luckily, the bedroom plants have been spared (so far) so they are looking pretty good.  I think I will have a WD and Saffron to share hopefully. :)

hello everyone,

i had sleeping beauty give me two blooms yesterday and i was not here to see them open first day. here are the second day blooms. photos were taken at 6:30 am this morning with harsh light. had to go to work to pay for my habits :).

first day color was intense. my house is a steady 70 degrees, might get cooler where they are at night. maybe no lower than 65. notice the snow and frozen lake in the background in the first image.

come on spring. :)

louis

(http://www.imagesct.com/web/hibiscus/1-23/sleep-1.jpg)

(http://www.imagesct.com/web/hibiscus/1-23/sleep-2.jpg)

(http://www.imagesct.com/web/hibiscus/1-23/sleep-3.jpg)

Hi Louis, must be really nice to see hibiscus blooms with the wintry backdrop out the window!

Charlie

Wild dream today :D  Much more speckling on this bloom than others.  Big too, about 8 inches, on a very small plant. 

Beautiful bloom, Chris!

Charlie

Im glad you like it!  :D

Here is Saffron :D

Wowee!  Such excellent color and form.

Charlie

Outstanding pic of Saffron Chris...

Are you growing that indoors ?

Makes me wish my Saffron had made it.  GREAT photos Chris!

Thanks for the complements, I do grow all my Hibs indoors.  They get a few hours of direct sun from a south facing window. 

I use all organic fertilizers:

BioBizz Bio-Grow (2-0.1-6) liquid fertilizer

Technaflora Soluble Seaweed Extract

These are used every watering, the seaweed extract (potassium) gives the blooms very bright coloration even though they are indoors.  I wanted to show that you could get excellent results using only organic fertilizers and I think that my plants have been doing great using organic ferts.  I really love saffrons bright colors and pollinated that bloom with pollen from WD, if all goes well I should have some seeds in the next month or tow.   

BioBizz Bio-Grow (2-0.1-6) liquid fertilizer is no longer available in the US from importers. We were going to offer it last year but the 2 main importer/distributors told us the European company that makes it raised the price too high and they were no longer distributing it. There must be bottles still in some stores but if you like it you better stock up! I need to check again to see if anyone else picked it up as an importer/distributor since it was the only liquid organic fertilizer we found with good ratios of N-P-K.

Charlie

Vin Extraordinaire has been blooming in the house lately, so I thought I would snap a pic and show it. For some reason this winter it almost always opens 2 blooms at a time. As you can see from the lavender tags I'm making crosses on this plant but when it is done blooming it will be cut up and grafted so that we can finally get this variety out there.
The colors are very intense and hard to capture but really beautiful in person.

Charlie

Hi Charlie,

I will stock up ASAP!  I didn't know that they are not importing it anymore.

Thanks for sharing that pic of Vin Extraordinaire!  I'm glad to hear that you will be grafting it finally!  Ive been waiting a long time for that one :P  

I think those crosses you did are going to be interesting.  

Vin x Mnt Air,  Vin x Space Oddity and CCacao

It would be interesting to see if Space Oddity's fading will be passed onto these offspring and what colors those CCacao crosses will be!

Thanks for sharing!  

Here is a photo of rainbow sherbet taken this morning.

Hi Laura,

Such a pretty flower to brighten up a winter day! Where are you growing your Rainbow Sherbet?

Charlie

I was just naming some photos taken earlier this winter when I came across the below photo of 'Golden Dreams', a cross between Wild Dream and Dragons Breath. I'm posting it as an example of the color shift caused by hot day temperatures and cool/cold night temperatures in a winter greenhouse. Note the shift in the yellows toward orange, and the overall color shift toward red/orange. It's pretty this way but you won't see it unless you have similar conditions to put it in. Also below there is a mid-summer hot weather bloom of 'Golden Dreams' for comparison.

Charlie

Charlie,
My plants are growing in my dorm room in Walla Walla, Wa.

Hi Laura,

I'm impressed! It's not that easy to get flowers in mid-January in Washington State. You must have a fairly sunny window and not as many clouds as the coastal cities have. My wife Cindy lived in Washington for 15 years or so and always enjoys it when we have orders from there.

Keep up the good work!

Tip for our forum readers - an online update to the store is in progress now, and will be completed by Sunday night. One of our regulars found something rare and special already. 

Charlie

 I have been trying to collect the CVs that are displaying darkening effects from the parents DB and BD.  With common ancestors, it is more likely that the same gene or genes are responsible for this desired trait.  The eventual goal is to get a homozygous cv by crossing these other CV that you could use that homo zygote to darken any color type you want, but we will see if this is not just a fantasy that is not possible.  It could be possible that homo zygotes are not fit and fail to form embryos, etc... 

lol Charlie,
Actually it has been foggy and overcast all winter. The only reason it had a flower was because I brought it home (Oregon) during Christmas break where it was sunny the whole time.

Hi Chris,

So we end up with dominant allele "D (darkening)" if we're lucky?

It's a good idea, so you would cross Black Dragon and, for example, Burnt Saffron, in an attempt to get the homozygous cv that would let us darken others? Would be cool, indeed!

Charlie

Aha, Laura! That would explain it then. I was never entirely sure how much light was needed to get blooms but the last 3 years in my current house was very instructive. We grow hibiscus in almost every window but they only get direct sun at certain times of year, different for each window, and it makes a difference. For example, Cindy grows small pots of hibiscus in a window in the dining room and although they are healthy and grow just fine year round with indirect light they only bloom in mid winter when the light angles in that window for just an hour or so a day but it is enough to get some buds on those plants.

Charlie

Yup Charlie, that is the idea Ive come up with.  Theres really know way of knowing how many genes are involved with this, and it assumes that it isnt already a homozygous recessive trait.  However, based on the fact that you can cross BD or DB with other CVs and observe darkening I am inclined to think you only need on copy of these gene or set of genes.  Once I get Dragon's heart blooming along with Burnt Saffron, that is a good cross to make just because It seems as though Dragon Heart is pretty vigorous, nice upright growth, branches readily AND has that Darkening effect from DB :)

I can't wait to see the results, Chris! Have to be patient as I've reminded myself repeatedly for the 15 years I've focused on hibiscus....... :)

Charlie