The purchased seed should work fine. Seed is not a problem if the pollination of the plant producing the seed is controlled. The seed produced in your garden is from a plant produced from a cross and can revert to either parent or anything in between. The purchased seed will be an F1 cross where both parents are known and the resulting seed is predictable, though not as predictable as a plant produced from a vegetative part of a plant with no sex involved. Al

I was unaware of that. Good to know. The canna in Q was a generic BBS plant. I will likely plant the seeds next spring since I have them, but without any expectations. Thanks.

Jeanne, Cannas grown from seed are all hybrids. The ones you see at karchesky are also hybrids that are propagated by bulbs (thats why they can sell you the exact plant you see online because you are actually getting a bulb of the plant as opposed to a seed of the plant). If they take seeds from those, they will have similar traits, but there will be differences in flower color, leaf color and flower composition. Intruige is also a hybrid, that explains why you have two colored "intruige" hybrids. A couple of years ago i traded for random canna seeds from several members, knowing that none of the seeds would come out as the parent plant they were collected from. I ended up with many interesting different new hybrids. I have many dark leaved cannas and green leaved cannas, with flowers ranging from peach, orange, pink, magenta, red, yellow with red tips, and yellow with LOTS of red spots. It's fun to grow cannas from seed not knowing what you will get. congrats. This year, my big-flowered cannas were growing near canna indica (small plant with small yellow flower with red tips) and i wouldn't doubt that they cross pollenized. I never collected the seeds so they fell all over the ground and now i have dozens of canna seedling growing all over the place. I'll see what surprises i get when they bloom this summer. Cool thing about seed grown hybrids is that there are no two alike, so you don't have to call them by their 'parent' name, you can make your own name. This is the canna with lots of red spots. The pic is blurry but if you look closely, you can see the spots. The shorter ones on the left have flowers that look almost completeley red and other yellow And another one of the hybrids i grew from seed And to the right of the Brugmasnia you can see the multi colored cannas (peach, red, and an orange on the far right)

Bob, Welcome to the world of growing cannas from seed even if not by design. Canna seeds are encased in a very hard outer coat that is nearly impervious to water. Until the outer shell is permeated the embryo cannot germinate. Canna seed can survive a very many years and remain viable. It has been established that native Indians used canna seeds in their musical hand rattles and after over 500 years the seed inside were found to be viable. Kent