Hi mantis__oh, " I liked the Benary's Wine and Coral. " Are there any other zinnia varieties that you liked? "It is a considerable waste of space to plant something that turns out to be not as pictured or a weak grower." I agree with that. However, as an amateur zinnia breeder, I do plant a lot of hand hybridized F1 and F2 hybrid zinnias that I know in advance I am going to cull a lot of them. Also, I will plant commercial zinnia varieties with the expectance that they will vary a lot and I will use pollen from or save seeds from only a few of the very best. If you choose to save seeds from your zinnias for use next year, it just makes sense to save seeds from only the best ones. And the following year, you will be saving seeds from the best of the best, and so on. You can make a lot of progress doing that. "...or a weak grower." There are zinnias that are just defective in that regard, but I have a big zinnia garden and sometimes some of my zinnias get neglected by me and I don't take the best care of them, and an inhospitable environment can make them seem to be a weak grower, when if I took really good care of them, they would flourish. If a zinnia appears to be "special" I designate it as a breeder, put a coded tag on it, and take better care of it than the ones I just keep for the butterflies and hummingbirds. There are several ways to improve your care of a zinnia that most people don't do. ZM This post was edited by zenman on Thu, Aug 14, 14 at 13:45

Bob, "The Sun Zinnia is an F1; wouldn't that guarantee new and different plants from succeeding generations even if it self pollinated?" The F2 generation from an F1 will recombine the genes of the two parents in many ways. Many, if not all, commercial F1 zinnias make use of male-sterile female plants (sometimes called "feminas") and carefully inbred male pollen-bearing strains. Frequently the feminas are apetalous (have no petals). For F1 seed production, the feminas and male plants are grown close to each other so that normal bee pollination does the actual pollination. The F1 seed are harvested from the feminas. You will see considerable variation in the F2s from Sun, as recombination occurs in many ways between the genes of the two different parents. You might even see some femina traits. But, because the male line is so purified, the chances are that they will all be the same color as the F1. The variation will much less than what you would see in the progeny of a hybrid rose (or a home-hybridized zinnia). I breed my zinnias in much the same way as rose breeders breed their hybrid roses. I hand pollinate, rather than rely on bees, so I can cross any specimen with any other specimen that I please. And I don't hesitate to cross hybrids with hybrids, so I don't spend generations inbreeding the parent lines. As a result of that, I will see an order of magnitude more heterozygosity in my progeny than I would in the progeny of a commercial F1 hybrid zinnia. I wouldn't hesitate a moment to grow the seed from a commercial F1 hybrid zinnia. In fact, I will be doing that very thing next Spring. I have some old seed of the Japanese-bred Silver Sun F1 hybrid (one of the Sun series separates that seems to have become unavailable in current catalogs). It's not pure white, and that may be why it fell out of favor. I don't have many seeds (a packet contains nominally 25 seeds) but I will plant a few inside, probably next month. And I will save a few seeds from the better specimens (even F1 hybrids vary some) for planting in-ground next Spring. I intend to cross some of the F1 hybrid Silver Suns with other indoor zinnias. If you think about that, there are some interesting implications. When I take pollen grains from an F1 Silver Sun, those grains aren't actually Silver Sun pollen. They are F2 recombinations pollen grains. And the egg cells in the female plant aren't that plant either, but recombinations from the heterozygous female. So we don't know what any of those recombinations would look like if we grew them. They all represent virtual zinnias that we never see (unless we grow haploids and double their chromosomes to diploids, but that is another story). So rose breeders and hobbyist zinnia breeders are doing pretty much the same, crossing virtual recombined pollen grains with virtual recombined egg cells. Each pollen grain and each egg cell is a separate recombination, so there there could be tremendous variety in the pollen grains and tremendous variety in the egg cells. That is why there is so much suspense in watching a new hybrid rose bloom for the first time, or in watching a new hybrid zinnia bloom for the first time. They have "virtual" parents that we never see. "...Or are the subsequent generations mostly weaker plants?" I would say, mostly not as good. But "good" is subjective, and there might be some little "weaker" progeny that people would marvel over as "cute". Sturgeon's law says that, "Ninety percent of everything is crud." (The last word is frequently misquoted as "crap".) Actually, I think of it in that second form. I cull my zinnias with Sturgeon's Law in mind. Actually, if I get 5% "good" from a zinnia grow-out, I feel pretty good, because I am going to save seeds from them and discard the 95% and things get better faster that way. I think that Sturgeon's Law will definitely apply to the progeny from your F1 Sun zinnias. But think of it in a "glass is half empty/half full" way. That 10% or even 5% can make it all worthwhile. I discard a lot of zinnias at first bloom, and I think that rose breeders do the same thing with their rose crosses. "The difference is that roses are vegetatively propagated, so a breeder could lock in the new rose immediately and not worry about trying to achieve seeds that reproduced true consistently." Very true. I have had some success growing zinnias from cuttings, and I am experimenting with Tissue Culture now as a possible more effective asexual micropropagation method. I don't anticipate that zinnias will be commercially propagated asexually, but I understand that some femina zinnia strains are increased by tissue culture. My idea is that if I get a really good zinnia, that if I increased it asexually to a lot of plants, I could get a huge seed yield which would be a step toward getting a stable seed strain. That would be a sort of "brute force" approach, that would involve growing a lot of zinnias, and selecting seed from only a few. ZM

Benary's Giant Wine is also a very rich deep color. I think it might give some good results if you crossed it with the Benary's Giant Scarlet. And the F2 generation could produce a whole spectrum of related rich colors. ZM (not associated with any product or vendor mentioned or linked)

Ann, I think you probably can keep her 5-6’ in a warmer zone. Grande Dame is extremely well branched and bushy, not a bare legs rose, but probably only flowers on the top 1/3. The growth and bloom size would both be comparable to the grandiflora Queen Elizabeth. (And that’s where I had a problem with the marketing, she was promoted more like a plus sized disease resistant Pink Peace or Miss AAB). This is her after a heavy rainstorm. (Grande Dame does have a tendency to nod, but the rain is exaggerating the effect). I actually like her giant fuchsia look here, gosh I’m starting to regret giving her away lol!