Knowing the parentage will not help you. Yes if a hybrid is grown from seed the seed will likely be viable, but you will never know what you are going to get especially if it is open pollinated. It may revert back to the parent. It may be like the hybrid or nothing like the parent or the hybrid. It may be like another species that was the pollinator. It may have been self pollinated or not at all and will produce small flowers or not be viable. When growers produce hybrid seed, they are hand pollinated from a like species when the flower is in bud, and then covered with mesh bags so no insect can pollinate them. They are left until the seed falls into the bag. If they are started from cuttings they will always be true because you are growing a piece of the original plant

Hi all, I have been doing a bit of research about Profusion zinnias, because I plan to grow some this year, and even try to make some crosses with them. My previous messages about Profusions were, uh, "uninformed". That's nice talk for "wrong". The new Profusion series are tetraploids of interspecies crosses of Z. angustifolia with Z. violacea (formerly known as Z. elegans). They are produced by the Sakata Seed company. The Pinwheel series from W. Atlee Burpee Company was introduced before the Profusions, and they arose from the same sort of interspecies crosses followed by doubling their chromosomes to produce a true-breeding new species. That new species has been named Zinnia marylandica, in honor of the University of Maryland, where a lot of the original research leading up to the successful crosses was done. Both the Pinwheels and the Profusions come true from seed because of their tetraploidy, and both are considered to be members of the new species named Zinnia marylandica. At the very minimum I plan to cross different colors of Profusions with each other, and different colors of Pinwheels with each other. And I also plan to attempt crosses of Pinwheels with Profusions. And maybe some other experimental crosses as well. Let the fun begin. MM

Please see my two posts on March 30, 2014. Only the earliest of hybrids released had two parents,and both parents are known for some of them. Later hybrids can have up to 4 parental inputs in each breeding line,as I explained in a previous posts I mentioned above so 8 parental inputs in each line.The last one in each line is crossed with the last one in the other line to make the stable F1 hybrid. Yes,there are many companies that breed F1 hybrids,mostly in the Netherlands and Israel and Japan and China,some still in the US such as Petoseed,which does custom breeding for Burpee although Burpee now has some breeders back in PA but I don't know of any releases yet,and do so since commercial farmers want F1 hybrids and preferably determinate ones to facilitate machine harvesting and those in areas want ones with tolerance,no such thing as total resistance,where soilborne diseases are found,which is not in all places of the US.. Companies don't breed OP heirloom varieties, for that would be the antithises of the word heirloom and let us NOT get into a discussion of what an heirloom is or is not,I mean you can,but there are many threads here already about that,no one definition,and I'm out on that subject.,LOL. Heirloom tomato varieties are sourced from many places and most of them,well maybe some,end up being listed in the SSE Annual Yearbooks,where they are then available to SSEmembers. To date I've grown about 4,000 plus heirloom varieties and have in introduced close to 300 new ones from various sources myself. And if you look at Tania's superb data website she has individual pages for about 5,000 now and taking all the ones that are in seedbanks in different countries there are probably close to 20,000, I should live so long being 77 this June.LOL

Carolyn, why not tell GardeningHarpist about growing out Ramapo hybrid? ***** Can do. For a while Ramapo F1 went out of production and since it was a fave of quite a few folks I decided to dehybridize it, aka, make selections, to see if I could develop an OP version that was close to the original. I had available to me some Ramapo F1 seeds as well as a 6 pack of Ramapo F1 plants that a friend in NJ sent to me, b'c several growers had sandbagged seeds, worried that Ramapo F1 might go out of production. Ramapo F1 has two parents as I indicated above. I saved seeds from F1 fruits, now called the F2 seeds, planted out the next year, I think only 4 plants and also planted out known Ramapo F1 plants from the seed I had for comparison sake. 3/4 plants walked and talked and tasted like the F1 and the 4th plant was a throw back to one of the parents. I saved seed, now F3 seed from one of the F2 plants that compared well with the original F1 and at that point I felt that the F3 seed was pretty darn good as an OP and distributed seed to quite a few folks. One person formerly was a commercial tomato grower in NJ and he also thought it was pretty good, and as the years went by folks shared seed with others and I know it was doing fine out to the F6 generation. Ramapo F1 was developed by Rutgers U in NJ and they've now made the original F1 seed and it's available from Rutgers directly and also from Harris Seeds in Rochester, NY. Usually it takes more generations than to the F3 to get something genetically stabilized so I got lucky on this one. The variety now known as OTV Brandywine I had to take out to the F5 before it was stable. Carolyn