Dave, I like both your Whirligig and your Burpeeana Giant. The Burpeeana Giant may become more solid colored in the next few days, but the petals have a nice corrugated texture that I like. Crossing those two could give some interesting results. The colors of both look quite bright and lively. I don't see how a hybrid between those two could turn out bad. I first started using nets to keep bees from "stealing" pollen from my choice breeders. The nets virtually revolutionized my breeding by giving me a much more dependable and abundant source of pollen from zinnias that looked especially good to me. Then I began using the nets to protect my stigmas from unwanted bee pollination. And finally, I began using the nets to keep seed-eating birds from eating my cross-pollinated seeds. For some perverse reason, the birds actually seemed to prefer my hand-hybridized seeds to the regular seeds. Perhaps the hybrid vigor made the seeds bigger and plumper and tastier. Or perhaps it was just my imagination. I have noticed that many of my hand pollinated seeds turn out to be noticeably larger than the regular seed packet zinnia seeds. That may be because I tend to preferentially choose the larger seeds to plant from my breeder seeds, and that may have the long term effect of breeding zinnias to have larger seeds. That wasn't a conscious goal, but I suppose larger seeds might be more attractive to birds. I am currently trying to think of better designs for my zinnia nets. I had settled on a simple flat rectangular net because it is simplest and quickest to make, but now I am thinking that I would like my nets to fit the zinnia bloom better, to be lighter, and to have less wind drag. I am planning to try several new designs and construction methods. Arlan used fiberglass window screen to make "zinnia bloom cages" and they seemed to work well, so I think I will also experiment with fiberglass window screen for making zinnia bloom protectors. I may even use a combination of materials, like fiberglass window screen and nylon netting. I will also experiment with lightweight techniques for joining the bloom cage components. ZM

Harkness have a new hulthemia - Alissar, Princess of Phoenicia, which is looking like a good doer - at the moment, it is completely healthy. Both Eyes for You and Alissar PoP are readily available in many nurseries in the UK so would expect these will be coming to the US soon. I have eyes for you (it looks very similar to tree paeonies)too but it is so far, staying quite gangly with little new growth apart from the original (very thorny and woody) three canes it came with. Annoyingly, it does not show an inclination for female fertility, refusing to set heps of any viability in its first year here. Couldn't say whether this is the case with Alissar as I have been dead-heading it. I am a little astonished at the sudden explosion of interest in these roses - Euphrates was bred back in the early 80's (I wasn't even much of a gardener but this rose stood out for me like a beacon) -I have been following all the breeding with hulthemias quite avidly ever since. Another rose I am hoping will be developed is the gooseberry leaved rose - R.stellata and stellata mirifica - this little rose also has an elusive darker tone at it's centre - a look I find very attractive.

Hi Ninecrow, Yeah, yeah, I know. I created Part 49, but Houzz lost it somehow. I have a Trouble Report in with them, but so far the only response is an automatic "we got your message" response. This was caused by a bug in the Houzz software, and I am not impressed that after 24 hours from reporting the problem, I still have not communicated with a Houzz human being. It will eventually get resolved, and there will be a Part 49. Oddly, the Link that doesn't work for you does work for me. But that is the only way I can access the new Part 49. I may just be accessing it in a local browser buffer. It doesn't show up in the Annuals message list or the Hybridizing message list (which I tagged for Part 49 because multiple forums for a message string is a feature of the new software). Unfortunately, using that feature led to the disappearance of the new Part 49. If I had not chosen to use the new feature, Part 49 would already be there for us. We shall see what we shall see. ZM

Hello everyone, Well, we did get that expected rain. It came with some winds, but I don't see any obvious wind damage. It is now comfortably cool outside, but very wet. I will shuck zinnia seeds indoors until things dry off a bit. This is one of those current narrow petaled specimens.The tubes are light colored, but unfortunately not white. This is a closer look at some of the petal ends.There is actually quite a bit of variation in the end-of-petal "flare". That suggests that the flares may be partially developmental rather than genetic. The embryo inside the green seed at the base of each petal would be genetically different if it had been fertilized by a pollen grain, either from this plant or from a different one, because it would have been produced by the cellular process known as meiosis, which recombines the genes. In the more likely probability that the embryos are not fertilized at this stage, the cells in the petal flares are produced by mitosis and are genetically the same as the cells in other parts of the bloom, so the variations in the petal-end flares would be developmental and not genetic. Which raises questions as to which of the many variations we see in zinnias are developmental and not genetic. At some time during the coming Winter I hope to purchase a stereo microscope with a camera mount, so that I can take micro-photographs of some of my indoor zinnias. It will not be capable of seeing chromosomes (that takes a serious high-power laboratory grade microscope), but it will hopefully be capable of seeing details like leaf stomata or leaf hairs, from which you can hopefully deduce whether the plant is diploid or tetraploid. That is because I want to develop the capability of producing some triploid zinnias, and to do that it is almost a requirement that I be able to determine the "ploidy" of a zinnia by observation. And the microscope will let me study and photograph my zinnias in more detail. I continue to see little creatures that I refer to as "micro insects". I am curious about them. More later. Namaste. ZM