Hi Rose,

"...how is that seed companies can sell seeds that will give you the hybrid plant?"

First of all, unfortunately a lot of seeds that are labeled as hybrid are actually open pollinated, although early in their development actual hybridization was done. However, if a seed is labeled as an "F1 hybrid" it is an actual hybrid. The F1 denotes a first generation hybrid. Some seed is labeled as F2 hybrid, and it is open pollinated from F1 hybrids.

Seed companies have various ways to produce true F1 hybrid seeds. For example with corn, the two parent varieties are grown in alternate rows, the plants of the seed row are de-tasseled so that only pollen from the tassels of the plants in the other rows can get on the silks of the seed plants. The F1 seeds are harvested only from the ears on the de-tasseled rows.

In the case of zinnias, there wasn't an economic way to create F1 seeds until John Mondry of W. Atlee Burpee Company discovered a petal-less (apetalous) male sterile mutant zinnia in 1948 which eventually led to introduction of the first commercial F1 hybrid zinnia, named "Trail Blazer". It used male sterility for seed production, in which the male sterile "femina" zinnias played a role analogous to the de-tasseled corn. The male pollen producing zinnias were carefully selected and re-selected to produce a uniform F1 hybrid.

As amateur zinnia breeders we are free to cross any zinnia in our patch with any other zinnia. The commercial zinnia seed producers simply can't afford to pay people to manually cross-pollinate zinnias.

"I understand if you take what's been open pollinated on a hybrid you will get a parent or potluck?"

A self-pollinated F1 produces F2 recombinations of the traits of the two parents of the F1. Because there are many ways in which the genetic traits can be recombined, there are many possible new traits in the F2s. You can get even more varieties of recombinations by crossing one F1 zinnia with a different F1 zinnia. I cross hybrids with hybrids and then cross those hybrid-hybrids with other hybrid-hybrids to produce hybrid-hybrid-hybrids, and so on. Sure, you get a lot of culls that way, but you also get some remarkable interesting new zinnias as well. Incidentally, that same technique is used by rose breeders. You can see the results much quicker with zinnias.

ZM

This post was edited by zenman on Tue, Jan 1, 13 at 10:10

Thanks Zenman.

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Happy Holidays to everyone!

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Your zinnias are gorgeous! How I wish I had the sun for them! Alas, I get 2 hours at best and live zinnia-deprived.

Hi Julianna,

Thanks for the compliment. Only 2 hours of sun would be very limiting, not just for zinnias, but for many ornamentals. When they say a plant needs "full sun", they usually mean 6 hours or more of direct sun per day, and zinnias need that.

I have grown zinnias under trees in as little as 4 hours of sun, but they tend to grow spindly and weak in that much shade. I have on occasions foliar fed zinnias with a weak solution of sugar to help them when they haven't been getting enough light for good photosynthesis, and that seems to help. Sugar feeding can help during periods of prolonged sunless weather, or even in sunny weather when the zinnias are growing so fast that they are actually limited by how fast they can photosynthesize sugar.

I notice you are in Arkansas, and trees can be very plentiful there. When we lived in Maine on a six-acre property that was nearly fully wooded, gardening was severely limited by the shade from trees. I purchased a good chain saw and wood chipper and "opened up the sky" for our garden. In the process I created a lot of firewood, wood chips for mulch and garden paths, and retaining walls for garden terraces on the sloping terrain.

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I put several brush piles through the shredder-chipper to fill many compost piles. The forest floor was littered with "deadfall" and rotting leaves, which were already partly decomposed. I had several different sized screens for the hammermill part of shredder-chipper, and the finest screen had one-quarter inch holes which would produce a very finely pulverized product with enormous surface area for rapid composting.

When we moved here to Kansas, I didn't expect to use the chainsaw or the shredder-chipper much, but I was surprised at how frequently they come in handy here. The wind breaks big limbs off the trees here and brush piles are common. I have four compost piles going now.

ZM

Well having shade created by t eh building is a bit better in combination with this climate. Full sun if often better judged at part sun with the extreme heat... and then go from there :) I'm able to grow a lot of partial shade plants fairly well because of the brightness of the balcony. It's strange to go back to a balcony after years of gardening in the ground. :)

To everyone--

Happy New Year! And I hope you had a wonderful Christmas!

May 2013 be the best gardening year ever!

ZM, I love your zinnia greetings for the season!

It's officially now time to give the catalogs serious attention! ;-)

JG

Today I sprayed Quikpro to get rid of some of the yard so I would have space for roses, wildflowers, and zinnias :)

Zenman, I found several lost pack of zinnias. (I put them in the freezer and forgot about them). The question I have is what is the difference btw the scabiosa, Candy Stripe, Peppermint, and Whirlygig zinnia's. I noticed they look a lot alike (except scabiosa's are puffy).

Hi Rose,

"...what is the difference between the scabiosa, Candy Stripe, Peppermint, and Whirlygig zinnia's? I noticed they look a lot alike (except scabiosa's are puffy)."

There is quite a bit of similarity between zinnias, until you look at them closer. The more you look at them, the more differences you will see.

The Scabiosa flowered zinnias don't have the yellow "starfish" shaped pollen florets like most zinnias do. Instead, their florets have petal colors, which makes them very interesting to me from the standpoint of zinnia breeding. They have medium-small flowers (1.5 to 2.5 inches in diameter) and medium tall (24 to 30 inches) well branched plants.

An important feature, from the standpoint of structural integrity, is that the scabiosa flowered plant's branches angle upwards from the main stem, somewhat like a tumbleweed. An acute angle of attachment is inherently stronger than a right angle attachment, and I look for acute branching in my breeders. Our Kansas winds tend to "stress test" my zinnias.

Branches on some Burpeanna Giants zinnias tend to grow straight out from the "trunk" and give the plant a candelabra look. They tend to break off easily. Those lower candelabra branches tend to be in contact with the soil, and can even strike roots of their own. Years ago when I first noticed zinnias branches developing roots I realized that it should be possible to grow zinnias from cuttings, and began the experiments that eventually led to a successful method of growing zinnias from cuttings.

Candy Cane zinnias (a Burpee origination) are striped, and have larger flowers (4 inches across) than Peppermint Striped zinnias, which are only about 2 inches across, but come in a wider range of color combinations.

Whirligig zinnias were derived from an inter-species cross between Zinnia violacea (elegans) and Zinnia haageana, and they show an entertaining wide variation in bicolor, tricolor, and monocolor petals in a variety of flower forms. I still grow the commercial Whirligigs as an ongoing source of new genetic material for my amateur plant breeding.

I personally don't care for the Candy Cane/Peppermint striped and spotted patterns, and quit growing them when that effect started showing up in some of my breeding projects, like on this scabious specimen.

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To me, some striped patterns look like some kind of zinnia chicken pox. I have seen striped patterns in Whirligigs that I liked (like the one pictured above on Sun, Oct 28, 12 at 11:30), and I will pursue that look.

Which zinnias you prefer to grow, and which specimens you choose to save seeds from, is entirely up to your own personal preferences. But as you look closer, you will see that most zinnias are a little bit like snowflakes, in that no two of them are exactly alike.

ZM
(not associated with any product or vendor mentioned or linked)

I like to original, like the Oakland series. The classic zinnia flower. But since I've become a seed hoarder, I got so many choices for zinnia's. I have to decide what to keep and what to trade off.

Do you have any idea of how long the avg viability of a zinnia seed if you keep it in the frig? That will be a major deciding factor in what stays and what goes.

I don't care for the Zahara singles, blooms are too small for me. I gave them away as goodies in my recent seed trades.

Benary's Giants are too tall, the blooms are beautiful. However, they can grow up to 5 ft or more. Giant Red Zinnia's are a keeper because they are butterfly magnets.

Purple Prince is a goodie. "Hot Crayons" are dazzling.

I might try my hand at pollinating this summer. It looks tedious, but fun.

Hi Rose,

"I found several lost pack of zinnias. (I put them in the freezer and forgot about them)"

"Do you have any idea of how long the avg viability of a zinnia seed if you keep it in the frig?"

It might make a difference whether it was the freezer or the fridge. I store my zinnias seeds on a shelf in the basement, which I know is not the best way. I plan to get a small refrigerator for my zinnia seed storage in the future. There was a message thread a few years ago that you might be interested in, Containers for long term seed storage. In particular, notice zeedman's comment, "Remember that if seed is frozen, it must remain sealed in its container after removal from the freezer, until the seeds (and the container) reach room temperature. Failure to do this can cause condensation on the seeds, which will quickly destroy them."

This Seed Longevity Table indicates that zinnia seeds are good for 5 to 6 years under "ideal" storage conditions. I have done that well with my room temperature storage of zinnia seeds, if 50% germination is "well" enough.

ZM

This post was edited by zenman on Fri, Jan 11, 13 at 0:05

Zenman, Thank You for the info and link. Most helpful.

Well you ruined me I just bought a bunch of whirligig seeds

Hi Viking,

The Whirligigs will show you a side of zinnias that you probably haven't seen before. There is some Whirligig "blood" in the majority of my breeding stock zinnias. Frequently the two-tone effect shows up in a rather subtle form, like in this bloom.

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Frequently I will notice some unintended insect or small spider in one of my photos, and this shows a magnified example of that.

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I don't know if that little guy was doing any harm, but the magnified view showed me something that I missed in the normal view -- namely that the petal ends of that specimen had vestigial "toothiness". You can see barely formed three teeth on the petal ends. I think that most, if not all, of my toothy strain got their toothiness from Whirligig ancestors.

Incidentally, there seems to be more than one "strain" of Whirligigs. Some, like those from Parks, feature more single and nearly single blooms, while others, like those from Stokes, have a much higher percentage of double blooms. It isn't so much the name on the seed packet that determines what you will get. It is the particular seed grower's field from which the zinnia seeds came. And nowadays the seed catalog companies don't grow very many (if any) of their own seeds, but purchase bulk seeds from specialist seed growers and package them in their own packets. The "factory" and the retail store are very much part of the structure of the garden seed industry.

That may be why it isn't unusual to see more than one seed catalog list the same variety as an "exclusive". They don't keep track of who their seed suppliers are selling to.

ZM

This thread is like the height of evil. I rationalized buying Crystal White and Profusion Apricot seeds because of it. Now I have my eyes on Magellan seeds once I realized they are my favorite form with a smaller size. Room for them? No. Light for them? Probably not. Evil. So evil. :P

I could not wait for my seeds to get here so I went to lowes and bought some zinnia seeds and have them growing under lights in the kitchen. The bug reminded me of a picture I took of one of my dahlias. I had a shirt made of the picture for my wife. In the picture every thing was perfect. But when the shirt arrived the picture was blown up and you know where this is going. Yes there was a big bug on the flower and the wife would not wear the shirt.

Hi Viking,

Last year, and particularly last Fall, I had a fairly extensive influx of Nine Spotted Cucumbers from the surrounding area.

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I just now noticed, they seem to have more than nine spots. Anyhow, at first they did just a little cosmetic damage, but I started seeing them hiding in my zinnia blooms more and more.

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As their numbers increased later in the season, their minor cosmetic damage became more extensive, and I started hand picking them. Not a very effective method of control, but it didn't involve applying insecticide. I am not an organic gardener, but I use some of their methods, including compost piles. And I try to minimize my use of insecticides and fungicides. This coming garden year, I have decided not to grow any cucumbers or melons that might "attract" the cucumber beetles. It remains to be seen if they continue to be a problem in my zinnias.

ZM

Hi Julianna,

I wish you well in your zinnia experiments in your low sunlight conditions. By coincidence, you have picked three different species of zinnias. Crystal White is Z. angustifolia, Profusion is Z. marylandica, and Magellan is Z. violacea (elegans). I am not sure, but I don't think any of those can be successfully crossed with the other. I have stayed with Z. violacea (elegans) primarily, because cross-pollinating them is easy and successful. And they have a lot of different forms and colors.

If your zinnias start to "pine away" because of a lack of sunlight, you might experiment with spraying them with a weak sugar solution to supplement their limited photosynthesis. I have had some success doing that. I use anywhere from one teaspoon sugar per gallon of water to one tablespoon of sugar per gallon. I wouldn't go too much richer than that, because you might attract flies, and you don't want your zinnias to be dripping syrup.

Sometimes I add a touch of soluble plant food to the spray for more complete nutrition. Foliar feeding is effective on zinnias. The blooms themselves can be sensitive to strong foliar feeding and could be burned, so if my zinnias are in bloom, I cut the foliar feeding to one-quarter strength or less. A half teaspoon per gallon should be safe for zinnia blooms. And at any given time, a zinnia plant doesn't need a huge amount of nutrients. Several weak applications are better than one strong application.

ZM

Thanks for the advice! We will see how this goes. I am hoping that at least one decent plant survives and does well. i do have the advantage of good air circulation, which will hopefully keep the plants happy and mildew-free. Here's to hoping!

Hi all,

Well, it is February already. I expanded my garden before the really cold weather hit, so I am beginning to plan my zinnia projects for this Spring. I hope to get an earlier start on some zinnias by several weeks. I am contemplating some in-ground seeding in April, which, in this location, may expose my seedlings to danger from a late freeze. I will use what they call a "low tunnel" to make it feasible to put a cover over them if frost threatens. I have already made some hoops for a low tunnel out of some one-half inch electrical conduit. I have never done this before, so it will be a learning experience for me. Some market gardeners routinely use low tunnels to get an early start on their crops. Maybe, on a smaller scale, that will work for my zinnias.

I guess my biggest single zinnia project this year will be an attempt to get useful new variations of the tubular-petaled zinnias. If I don't make significant progress in that area this year, I will de-emphasize that project. But I won't abandon it altogether.

I am going to grow another large planting of Whirligigs looking for, among other things, something comparable to JG's Extreme Roll strain.

I hope to make some more progress with my "toothy" strain. This was one of my later toothy specimens last year.

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It has obvious Whirligig heritage, with near-white toothy petal tips. This next toothy specimen reversed the location of the white, by having it near the base of the petals.

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I hope to grow enough toothies this year to find some better, more extreme, examples of toothiness, and inter-cross them. I also need to expand their color range.

In previous years, I "over bought" zinnia seeds. I am going to plant out all of my old Burpee Burpeeana Giants seeds and Burpee Hybrids seeds, looking for good examples to serve as females for various out-crosses from any interesting specimens that come out of my current breeder seeds. Hopefully there will be some new tubular forms in those "interesting specimens." And I will try to diversify my scabious strains. And grow some green zinnias, and some of the mottled and streaked forms. And some other zinnia projects as well. I think I now have enough garden space to pretty much deplete my inventory of saved zinnia seeds. It should be an interesting zinnia year.

ZM

Sounds Good Zenman! I got too many seeds as well, but I don't have the space to plant them all. I'm giving a lot of seeds as bonus seeds in my trades. Be patiently waiting for your pictures.

All the marvelous photos of Zinnias are inspiring me to plant a few this summer. Thanks everyone.

I like to post pictures of my zinnias. But this new "makeover" of GardenWeb kind of reminds me of that movie titled "Honey, I shrunk the kids!" It looks like GardenWeb seriously shrunk most of our pictures. And some of them didn't even maintain the same proportions of width to height.

Oh well. At least we can still post pictures of a sort. I won't even link this one in. I will just upload it. It was one of my recombinants from scabiosa flowered x cactus flowered x Whirligig, and it has a hint of two-tone, extra long guard petals, and a conventional scabiosa flowered center.

I'm going to experiment uploading another picture, this time using links, going for a larger picture (these pictures are still shrunk, apparently to make room for the ads on the right). This is a picture of one of my Whirligigs last year.

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What I like about that one is that the white color is confined mostly to the tips of the petals. I plan to plant a bunch more Whirligigs this year.

ZM

Do you find much variability in the white trait you described in Whirligig Zinnia?

Hi Joseph,

Yes, I find a lot of variability in the white trait in the Whirligig zinnias, and in zinnias in general. The color itself can range from a cool pure snow white to a warm white to an ivory to a pale cream. And it can continue in an apparent continuum into pale yellow, yellow, dark yellow, golden yellow, and through a range of yellow-oranges into oranges. And from there through red oranges, tangerine, and to the warm reds like scarlet. It seems like a continuum of color, although I know it must not be, because discrete genetic codes on the DNA are at work.

And the white can be just barely brushed on the tips or it can occupy a large percentage of the petal, like in this specimen, where the white is more of an ivory.

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Zinnia petals have many forms and colorations, and it must be a very multi-genic situation. I notice you have done some good work with morning glories. Maybe some day genetic engineering techniques will get some of those beautiful blues from morning glories into zinnias. We could trade you a whole range of yellows. (grin)

ZM

I do like the coloration in Whirligig. It reminds me of a Pelargonium I grew years ago, 'Mr. Wren'.

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We would certainly do a trade of the genes for blue color for yellow. What a wild dream to see a blue Zinnia like the blue in this flower:

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Joseph,

Those are great pictures. I have seen some of your morning glory pictures in other message threads, and they are marvelous. I particularly like it that you are growing some of your morning glories indoors during the Winter. That gives you the ability to accelerate your breeding activities by getting more generations per year. This is another Whirligig and it has even more of the petal having the tip color.

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In this case, the tip color is a light cream color. Considering just the different arrangements of color on the petals, several different "genes" seem to be involved, which gives a greater opportunity for recombinations in subsequent hybrid generations.

ZM

I should try crossing some varieties of MG, however, I never got into doing it. I may try it this summer.

It should be rather easy to cross-pollinate morning glories. You might need to split the bloom to get more convenient access to the anthers. There are a lot of possibilities for different crosses to make. If I were breeding morning glories, I would be going after yellows. I think there is a yellow Ipomea species. But, for some reason, I have never seen any "really yellow" morning glories. The same thing used to be true for petunias, but now there are some semi-good yellow petunias.

ZM

Yellow and also black morning glory flowers existed in Edo Period Japan, hundreds of years ago. I was told by a Japanese gardening friend that the person who develops a morning glory of either these two colors would be considered a god by the many morning glory growers in Japan. They want those colors badly that died out.

If you got yellow, black would be rather easy. Just cross the yellow with the darkest purple, and since the color mixing in a petal is subtractive, yellow and dark purple would be very nearly black.

I love seeing all your new kinds of zinnias! I've grown a few last year (lilliput, thumbelina, giant cactus flower, and peppermint stick). Now I'm tempted by those whirligig seeds! :) The bicolors are beautiful.

hello everyone!!!!!!

Zenman sent me here.

Zinnias are my favorite flowers, and I'm interested in learning how to breed them. I love looking at your pictures. I'm going to attach a picture of some of my zinnias. they are just "basic" zinnias but I love them just the same!! Over the winter I've been collecting different flavors of zinnias through seed trading, including "peppermint" and "striped" and "Cactus" zinnias. I've never had these kinds of zinnias before. I even found a green zinnia, I can't wait to grow it!!! :)

I hope to learn how to breed zinnias because I want to make new colors and share them with my daddy. I inherited his green thumb and his zinnias. He can't really garden as much anymore because he is disabled, but he gardens out of pots now.

Hi MandyRose and Desirai,

Welcome to this forum. This should be an interesting zinnia year for all of us.

Desirai, I will answer your email question here, because the question and the answer might be of interest to other readers here.

"...how do you tell the difference between male and female zinnias, and how do you get the pollen in the right place on the female zinnia?"

With respect to how you tell the difference between a male and a female zinnia, a typical zinnia bloom has both male and female flower parts. The male parts are the fuzzy yellow "starfish" shaped florets that appear toward the center of the flower. They usually have 5 or 6 "arms". In the morning, yellow pollen grains will spill from the center of the florets, and some of the pollen grains will lodge temporarily in the "fur" on the floret arms. The female parts on the zinnia flower are called stigma, and they are the slender yellow Y-shaped "forked tongues" that appear at the base of the petals. When a zinnia pollen grain sticks to a stigma, it can grow a long thin extension down inside the stigma to the egg cell inside the green seed cover at the base of the petal, which fertilizes the egg and starts the growth of the new embryo inside the seed cover. Some florets will also fertilize themselves and form a seed at the base of the floret.

You can cross pollinate a zinnia with another zinnia by taking pollen from one zinnia and placing it on the stigmas of another zinnia. There are several ways of doing that, and photographs showing how were included back on Tuesday, December 4th, 2012, in this message thread.

If you want to save seed from a favorite zinnia without crossing it with another zinnia, you can take pollen from its florets and apply that pollen to the stigmas of that same zinnia. That could occur naturally by pollen grains just falling luckily onto the stigma, or a pollen-gathering bee accidentally jostling some pollen, but you can increase the seed yield, and reduce the amount of accidental unknown pollination, by transferring the pollen yourself. That is sometimes called "selfing" the zinnia.

ZM

So the female 'parts' are the tiny little strands of hair looking things that I see in your demonstration pictures?

Hi Desirai,

Yes. The stigmas show up rather clearly in this picture because they are yellow, and the purple petal color contrasts well with them.

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There are very rare instances when the stigma will have three or more "arms" and I think there are a couple of examples of that shown in pictures earlier in this message thread. But almost all of the time they will be like the ones in this picture. Depending on the size of the flower, and its genetics, the size and length of the stigmas can vary considerably. Occasionally some of my breeder zinnias have very large very long stigmas, which makes it quite easy to pollinate them. Some of the scabiosa flowered zinnias can have stigmas that are partially concealed inside their florets. I think there is a picture of that earlier in this message thread, too.

When a stigma is fertilized by a pollen grain, that stigma will shrivel and die within a day or two. But until it gets fertilized, it will remain yellow and normal looking for over a week. So you actually have well over a week of opportunities to fertilize each seed in your zinnia flower head. When you apply some zinnia pollen to a zinnia stigma, it almost always "takes" that day, and that stigma will be beginning to shrivel the next day, and obviously no longer "receptive".

ZM

Hi all,

Last year I had a lot of butterflies in my zinnia patch, but for some reason this was the most common of the large butterflies.

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I am no butterfly expert, but I think that they were one of the Fritillaries. I have no idea what their food plant was, but I don't think they laid eggs on my zinnias. I hope to see more of them, and lots of other butterflies on my zinnias again this year.

ZM

I think Zinnia is a good landing pad flat flower for butterfly, and is an excellent nectar source for them. That is a nice butterfly shot, how close did she let you get so you could take the photo?

Hi Joseph,

I was standing right at the flower aiming nearly straight down, so I was maybe 2 feet from the butterfly. There were several dozen butterflies in the zinnia patch, and you could just stand near a flower and wait a minute or two for one to come to you. However, they would give you only a few seconds to get a picture, and even then, they tended to move about and the wind moved them some, too. I took quite a few "bad" shots of butterflies that day. I'll spend a little more time taking butterfly pictures this year.

ZM

That's awesome you could get up close and personal with them. I'll be growing Zinnia this summer thanks to your threads here in this forum. I picked up a couple of packs of seeds at the Philadelphia Flower Show this past weekend. One is advertised as bright pink and the other should be all white. I'm excited to see the flowers and butterfly visitors!

That's an unusual source of zinnia seeds. Both packets are heirloom varieties. Polar Bear is a good white, and Luminosa is a good pink. Butterflies should like them.

I plan to have a separate patch of several different varieties of white zinnias this year, with the idea of intercrossing them for some hopefully improved white zinnias. That patch will include some white cactus flowered zinnias, Benary's Giants White, and Oklahoma White. Hopefully I will get some diversity in their progeny. I have had a few good whites, like this one last year.

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But I want more different flower forms in white, like toothy, tubular, and spider,.

ZM

I had not heard of this seed vendor before. They appear to have been in business in New York state since early 2000's. I enjoyed their artistic packets but opted for the less expensive ones. You can easily find their web site if you search using your favorite web browser.

You put the different white flower varieties of together and then let the pollinators do the crossings or do you have a more active role? I think the latter is the answer.

I grew a pure white Impatiens balsamina recently and enjoyed it. I look forward to the white zinnia.

Hang in there gang it is only a few more inches of zinnias till spring.

Hi Viking,

You have gotten a really big head start on the rest of us. My tiny zinnia seedlings are just beginning to get their first set of true leaves. Your seedlings in the white pot are stretched up much too far. Zinnia seedlings need quite a bit of light when they first come up.

Our safe no-frost date here is debatable, but I am planning to put some stuff out the first of April, or a little later, (hopefully I will not be the April fool) with the idea of giving it some frost protection if it needs it. Which it probably will. The first of May would be less risky, but I want to push for an earlier zinnia bloom this year. I am preparing to provide some frost protection to the early entrants into my garden.

ZM

Gerris2, I have a lot of giant Red Zinnia seeds, if your are interested I'll send you some? They are butterfly magnets, the flowers have large pollen anthers.

Hi all,

This thread is getting kind of long and possibly slow to load for some people, so we are continuing this over at "It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 20". See you all over there.

ZM