Greetings and welcome to the HVH Forum - a different kind of forum than others you may have participated in. We hope you have fun and learn a lot from reading the posts here. Anyone can read the posts, but the forum software only allows those who register as members (simple, fast, and privacy guaranteed) to post messages. If you want to post, and we encourage you to do so, please read the guidelines below that describe how and what to post to this forum.
Guidelines For Posting1. This is an informational forum designed to help interested gardeners, landscapers, and plant collectors decide which cultivars of hibiscus they want to grow and how to grow them successfully. In the rapidly changing world of hibiscus growing and hybridizing, it has become a sometimes daunting task to decide just which varieties to acquire and grow. We hope this forum will help everyone with that decision. We also hope the posts here will help us learn more from you about the plants we offer and will guide us with our future hybridizing and selection of varieties to offer.
*You do not have to be an expert hibiscus grower to post here. All comments are welcome, including ones from new hibiscus enthusiasts. There are many more new growers than experienced growers out there, so please share your experiences with them whether you are an old timer or a newcomer to the world of hibiscus!
2. This forum is mostly limited to discussing the varieties of hibiscus that Hidden Valley Hibiscus has offered to gardeners for the last decade or so. Although most of these cultivars were hybridized by Charles Black we also offer what we consider to be the best varieties from other hybridizers as well. We appreciate your cooperation in not starting topics about other varieties that we have no experience with. If you are not certain about which varieties to discuss, a good place to check out is the newly revised HVH Gallery that shows about 500 of the varieties that we grow for sale. It is located at
http://www.hiddenvalleynaturearts.com/catalog.htm3. The forum also features a section for discussing questions about the care of hibiscus and the products that HVH offers to help with that care. There are no dumb questions - please feel free to ask anything about hibiscus care, no matter whether you think it a beginner's question or a complex expert level question. Any registered forum member can contribute to the answer, and Cindy or I will offer our opinions as often as we can. We receive lots of private email with such questions and have always felt it was a shame that the replies we write are not available for all interested hibiscus growers to read. Hopefully, that will be remedied with this new forum.
4. To post a message to this forum (after completing the simple registration) either select a topic already started and and then hit the "reply" button or select the "Start New Topic" button. The subject of each new topic is the name of a cultivar of hibiscus. If you start a new topic in the Hibiscus Care Board just choose a pertinent subject name, example: "Fertilizer". If we don't think the name works we will change it later - no offense intended. Our goal is to make the topics discussed here easily accessible to anyone looking for specific information. BTW, the "search" function is a great way to find specific info that you are interested in.
5. Please make your posts positive in tone. Constructive criticism is fine, just remember that no one likes to read comments reeking of negativity.
We reserve the right to edit or delete messages we think are inappropriate for this forum.
6. Only posts that contain something that adds to the subject under discussion will be left up. Posts that only contain greetings, congratulations, me too's, thank you's and so forth will eventually be deleted by the moderators. It is fine to start a post with the above, but the post should also add something about your own personal experience with the variety or topic under discussion, or include a question, or include an original photo of that variety. Thanks for your help with this!
7. By popular demand, no advertisements or links to commercial sites are appropriate unless moderators decide they are of general interest to forum members - example: links to pots that hibiscus growers might find useful are ok but links to tropical fish sites are not.
8. Photos - not required but enjoyed by everyone. 6 photos can be attached to any one post. They must each have a file size less than 400 kb.
That's it, no more guidelines... We've included these in order to make this forum as useful to hibiscus enthusiasts as possible. Thanks for visiting the forum.
Charlie and Cindy Black, owners of HVH and moderators of the forum.[/lef
