Hidden Valley Hibiscus
Growers & Hybridizers of Exotic, Tropical Hibiscus

Volume 20, Issue 3
March 2020

News from Hidden Valley Hibiscus

HVH Awards Edition!

2009 Hibiscus of the Year 'Acapulco Gold'
Runner-Up for 2019 'Midnight Tryst' in Page Border

'High Drama'

'Paso Doble'

'Lovestruck'

Happy Spring to All!

Spring is here! We are hoping that it will warm up a bit more here at our shipping office so we can start spring shipping the last week in March. We have many hundreds of orders to ship out over the next three months, so please be patient while we go through the process. We want to ship our plants even faster than you want us to, so we promise, we are shipping each order as soon as all the plants in each order are ready and as soon as the weather along the delivery route is consistently above 40 degrees at night.

This month we are featuring our 2019 HVH Hibiscus Awards. This year's winners were stand-outs both for us in the greenhouse and for customers who have grown them. For once we had easy decisions! We hope you like our choices.

At the bottom of the newsletter, you can see all our Past HVH Award Winners, in case you have missed them in past years. We still grow most of them, and many of them are available right now in our online store on the Tried and True hibiscus varieties. Enjoy!

Happy Spring to all!

Charles & Cindy Black

'Vaudeville'

'Joy'

'Trojan Horse'

HVH Hibiscus Awards for 2019

It's time for our hibiscus awards for 2019. Again this year our focus was looking for super bloomers. We have worked so hard for so many years on creating strong, vigorous bushes that grow on their own roots, plus we have worked on larger and larger giant and "super giant" flowers. But for the last few years, we have really increased our work on developing super-blooming hibiscus that bloom year-round under a variety of conditions, and almost always have flowers on them. These are the hibiscus plants that bloom and bloom every day - frequently with multiple flowers. So that was our focus in choosing our awards this year. But also each of the hibiscus we consider has to have the following traits:

The flower must have:

Exceptional beauty
Good size
Good form
Durable color
A long-lasting bloom

The bush must be:

Strong, vigorous, and easy to grow
Lush and pretty
Well branched
Upright without drooping or "flopping" branches
A good bloomer

Hibiscus of the Year is a variety that we have been growing for several years, that has proven itself to be reliable, beautiful, and an overall excellent performer and bloomer.

Seedling of the Year is a new hybrid variety that has impressed us very much during its first full year of growing in our greenhouse. It demonstrates some kind of new break-through for us in our hybridizing program, and embodies all the qualities we are striving for.

Our Winners for 2019 are. . .

Hibiscus of the Year: 'Bantam Rooster'

Exotic Hibiscus 'Bantam Rooster'

Photo Credit: Darren Eminian

Our Hibiscus of the Year is 'Bantam Rooster.' We chose it because it blooms all the time with consistently beautiful flowers in all kinds of settings - in pots in our greenhouse, outside in the ground, or inside a house. The colors and markings of 'Bantam Rooster' are amazingly consistent! They vary in different seasons and temperatures, but they are always recognizable and the markings never disappear. 'Bantam Rooster' blooms with smaller 5-7" flowers, but these flowers never stop coming! It blooms all the time, in all seasons, under all conditions. With our focus this year on heavy blooming, 'Bantam Rooster' was the obvious choice, because it is one of the heaviest blooming hibiscus plants we grow. The bush is well branched, full and a prolific bloomer. We have 'Bantam Rooster' available for sale right now on our Tried and True Page in our online store.

Photo Credit: Darren Eminian

Photo Credit: Thomas Narolewski

Seedling of the Year: 'Genie in a Bottle'

Our Seedling of the Year is 'Genie in a Bottle.' This hibiscus has been on our radar since we first saw the very first flower on its baby seedling plant. It was a seedling of the month just last year, and was so promising that we propagated it much earlier than usual. The propagation went so well, the new plants grew so fast and bloomed so profusely, that we escalated everything for this amazing hibiscus! It whizzed through all our tests, and we actually started selling it within a year of seeing our very first flowers. This is a first for us! It usually takes us 2 years on the fastest track to get a new seedling through all these processes, and it often takes 3-4 years. Everything about 'Genie in a Bottle' has been spectacular for us. It blooms like crazy all the time, all year round, even in mid-winter. The flowers are large, 6-9", and always multi-colored. The colors are much softer in winter and much more intense in summer, but they are always beautiful. The bush is full, well branched and a super bloomer. We don't have 'Genie in a Bottle' available for sale right now, but hope to have it back in our store sometime later this year.

And the Runners-Up for 2019 are. . .

Hibiscus of the Year Runners-Up

Seedling of the Year Runners-Up

HVH Hibiscus Awards from Years Past

Below are our award winners for past years. Over the years, as we have hybridized better bushes, larger flowers, better color durability, or better vigor, we have stopped growing a few of these old classics. We try to bring most of them back at some time during the year. But all of them are the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of many of our new hybrids! Often their offspring have improved traits that we want to keep, so we grow the offspring instead of the original award-winning plant. We have many of these award-winners and even more of their descendants in our store right now!