Wow, its breathtaking and so exotic looking!

Fancy tropical hibiscus can have blooms in excess of 10 inches! Depends on the variety, but most of mine are in the 8 inch range, some smaller. Plants too are variable, some being big growers and others small and compact. Flowers last one to a few days each - this flower lasted two days. If you Google up 'Night Runner' you will see that the flowers can vary in color depending on the temperatures and PH at time of blooming. Some are darker blooms like mine, but others may be brilliant with vivid pink, yellow, red, orange. Purples are dusky.

Yes, I have to bring these indoors for winter. I cut them back and can root or graft cuttings, or send them to friends to trade. Tropical hibiscus can be hard to root but not always. Lots of info online. You can let them go dormant over the winter months or you can keep them under lights in a warm room. They are fun to start from seed.

Here's a great website where you can learn more and see lots of photos of new varieties: http://internationalhibiscussociety.org/new (They are on Facebook too)

What is a good nursery for buying the fancy tropical hibiscus online? My local nurseries only sell the single, smaller bloom varieties. Thanks!

There are a number. Hidden Valley Hibiscus comes very highly rated:
http://www.exotic-hibiscus.com/

David Thompson (plant_maniac) on Ebay is a very reputable seller who's also well known for his streptocarpus hybrids as well as his grafted hibiscus:
http://stores.ebay.com/David-Thompsons-Plants/_i.html?rt=nc&_sid=682933128&_sticky=1&_trksid=p4634.c0.m14&_sop=1&_sc=1

I got my 'Pride of Hankins' from 'Almost Eden' as it's a very hardy root stock favoured for grafting. They had a great price and sent me a large young plant.
https://almostedenplants.com/shopping/products/875-pride-of-hankins-hibiscus/

The Hibiscus Place comes well recommended and does pre-orders. I have a few on order with them but hadn't gotten them yet. https://www.hibiscusplace.com/

And one of the most sought after tropical hibiscus growers is Richard Johnson who offers seeds on Ebay here:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/1hotrj/m.html

Thank you for the links. I looked at David Thompson's plants and Richard Johnson's. Gorgeous. Do the hibiscus come true from seeds? Are they difficult to start? I like the swirly hibiscus Richard Johnson has. Unfortunately, I never win on eBay bids and usually "buy now."

No hybrid plant of /any/ kind comes true from seeds unless you line breed it for many generations, locking in paired dominants or paired recessives. So the answer is very much no. Not just for hibiscus, but any hybrid plant. There are some that get enough generations hammered out and weed to nail down particular traits in hybrid seed but those take a huge commitment of time and effort and should never be assumed.

Anytime you cross two plants that are not alike, you will especially get highly varied results as a general rule. Self pollinating any hybrid that hasn't been line bred for a good while will also throw wild and variable results. Species crossed with the same have already had nature cull out the variables for you.

On the other hand, hybrid seed /can/ give you some astounding results that can really surprise you. Both in good ways and bad. But even if you are ruthless in what you weed out and cull (sell, give away, compost) and keep only 5 percent of your very best offspring, that is precisely how new hybrids are generated.

If you want any kind of non-stabilized hybrid to be reproduced true to the parent, you have to either graft them or reproduce them by methods such as tissue culture, but not by seed.

To see samples of hybrid crosses and the offspring they produced, a sample would be to go to this website and put in the name of any tropical hibiscus. In this case, I have input 'Night Runner' as shown above to show you what it's recent genealogy is and what the parents looked like. So dig up a few names to input and you can have fun seeing if they have records and what sorts of surprises cropped up in their breeding. A really fun website!

http://www.internationalhibiscussociety.org/SEArchive/index1.php

Also bear in mind that the growing conditions at time of flowering can produce rather dramatic variation in how a single hybrid's flowers may look from one blooming to the next. The 'mother' plant called 'Rum Runner' here looks very strongly pink! But this hybrid more often is deep pink with a white sheen that makes the center look purplish, while the edges are often yellow. Temperature, PH and feeding can throw the flower colors dramatically lighter, darker, brighter, larger, smaller, and even make 'double' flowered forms throw single layered flowers. So always a good idea to Google up a hybrid's name and see as many photo examples of it as you can, grown by many different people, so that you will know how variable or how stable it tends to be under various grower conditions.

So a flower blooming it's first morning in a cool, dry, mid winter indoors growing space will very likely look much different than the same plant showing a late second day flower on a hot, humid summer day. You may not even believe it's the same plant!

So interesting. A lot of variation in the Night Runner crosses. How do you ever cull the babies?

I haven't hybridized tropical hibiscus yet myself. But I do hybridize other kinds of plants (mostly gesneriads like streptocarpus). You grow them large enough to flower and when they do, photograph and measure them. First flowers are rarely good enough to decide if you want to keep it or not, but I'll cull the obvious duds that are least interesting to make room to keep others. They go to the compost pile or may be given away to friends. For reasons of quality control it's usually considered bad form to sell the inferior culls and it confuses nomeclature if there are look a likes.

If you have the space, ideally you keep weeding out until you are down to the very few best options. Those very few (often around 5 percent or less) are kept and bloomed for at least 18 months. It also gives you time to see their growth habit /and/ most importantly reproduce them by cuttings. I can't speak for hibiscus societies registration practices but the usual horticultural standard is to reproduce the parent hybrid at least two more generations (three in all) to see how stable the flower forms are, how long to maturity, growth forms, average flower sizes, and how they preform under various growing conditions. Some hybrids do not stand up to cloning and produce inferior offspring or nonstable sports.

Only once those tests have been done would a hybridizer decide whether a given plant is superior enough in comparison to similar other forms to warrant registration. So it's a big investment in time, effort and space! But plant registries do not all have the same requirements or quality standards for registering new hybrids.

If you go to the pages in the International Hibiscus Society's 'Nomeclature' section you can see what their requirements are - which include submitting three photos of flowers to show their consistency in form, size and color. There is a judgement period once submitted to decide if offered new forms are worthy of being named.

Definitely a lot of time and effort, but what a beautiful reward in developing a new variety. When I grew many antique roses, I only had two sports over about 20 years. Unfortunately, they were not very strong and didn't survive. I grew a few plants from rose seeds, but also lost them. If I didn't get freezes here, I would love to grow more tropical hibiscus and experiment with them. Our last three years have been very warm, so maybe they would live through the "new" winter. Not so good for fruit trees that need dormancy. I have several very tough old tropical hibiscus varieties that don't seem to mind a freeze, but they don't have the bright colors of the fancy tropicals or the large blooms.

Depending on what you are willing to do with over wintering them, and your space, you /can/ store them dormant. Anywhere they won't freeze, such as along a wall or some corner of a garage. Simply cut them well back to take up little space and let them go mostly dry even without light, until spring, or just long enough to get through your freezes.

I see you are in zone 9a? You are in an even warmer, milder location than I am. At the Atlanta Botanical Gardens they leave a lot of their tropicals planted outside (zone 8) over the winters and simply drop wire fences over the plantings and backfill them with a thick covering of dried leaves after the plants have been cut back. That way plants like bananas have no trouble with Atlanta winters even though our temps routinely fall into the teens.

Lastly, since are you in a warmer, milder climate than I am, you can even consider putting up a cold frame hoop house inexpensively for those brief cold snaps. I see no particular difficulty with your wintering over fancy tropical hibsicus in your subtropical zone. But up to you what time and effort you are willing to invest, or are physically up to, or have space to do. Older I get, the less willing I am to lug around a lot of large plants so I have been eyeballing my beloved coffee trees. I think their days with me are numbered if I can't put up a greenhouse, once we move back up into the mountains. My hisbiscus though can be kept in smaller pots and cut back hard so they are a lot less effort than my coffee trees for keeping over winter.