The best Bushes !

[farmer d]

Erny this is a great idea to update this topic!  Seeing your bush shots is so helpful for me to gauge where mine are at, if I can get more out of them and which ones I should reconsider getting...

John I agree with you on Rainbow Sherbet, just an amazingly easy and symmetrical bush to grow for me so far (4/2010 planted as a big 4").  What I love about Cindy's Heart is that it really does it's best growing in the hot sun - out of over 100 here it is the best in that category.  I am hoping Ingenue does the same, I planted mine in a really hot spot and so far it is looking great.

Erny my Sizzle looks exactly like your's, super vigorous and a really full, round shape to it.  Mine lost quite a few leaves from the freeze last month so we'll see if she'll refoliate like before.

One thing I have been doing with my bushes is I try not to prune them so I can see what their true shape is meant to be.  An interesting example is Acapulco Gold.  From what I've read here on the forum people are quick to prune it since it tends to have such a vigorous and more open growth habit.  Being that mine is outdoors and in the ground I have not touched it.  What I have seen is how immense the width is going to be on this cv.  

Erny I saw this first hand at your house with many of your hibiscus.  Many that I've had for a while now like Valentines Day, Black Dream, Palm Springs, Daisy Mae, and Some Like It Hot are showing this same characteristic also.  I'm talking like 6-7 feet across, so as they mature and grow both horizontally and vertically I am very curious to see if they fill in with lush leafing and branching.  It seems like the plant wants to first send out these horizontal branches far away from the base and then many new branches form off of these big offshoots all of which are growing vertical.  I am seeing this patten on most of my plants these days.  I'll post some pics to show this.  It is very exciting to see how monsterously big these plants want to be when the roots have no bounds.

My best bush out of all of mine is Valentines Day.  It has become so wide which is a challenge as I am so space constrained on my property that I have developed a new technique where I tie wires from the outer branches to the inner ones to train them to grow more vertically and keep the width of the bush a little more under control.  I have done this technique now with quite a few of my hibiscus in an effort to give the smaller and younger ones some breathing room to properly grow.  Pics to follow soon...

Farmer D

[Ernest]

Darren and John, my Rainbow Sherbert and Valentine's Day also show great promise with upright growth and good branching. I didn't include them because they haven't grown as much thus far as the  others. Since so many of mine have only been in the ground for about 6 months there is probably a considerable bias toward the faster growers and possibly the better winter growers.
By contrast, my first planting 10 years ago with nine older cvs has grown into a hedge so thick that it is almost impossible to tell anything about any single cv's growth pattern.

Erny

[Charlie]

Great discussion. Thanks for the photos and details, Erny. You may be right that some of the top 20 are fast or good winter growers, but many will probably stay in your top group. A few others, Confection Perfection comes to mind, are slower growers but still become very large and full plants as they mature over several years. The advantage of that is that they also remain more compact and full of blooming stems as they grow larger. I look forward to seeing the results from this summer!

Interesting technique for getting more space, Darren. I really want to visit and see all this soon.

Charlie