Also, lest anyone get the wrong impression of the College of the Ozarks or the quality of their plants and seeds, I've gotten tainted seeds from at least two other commercial varieties. I've gotten some gorgeous zinnias from the College of the Ozarks, and would never throw shade at the program. A few of my favorites from previous years, all grown from their complimentary seeds:

A GIANT stoplight red. The flower was easily the size of my hand and had some lovely lavender and white markings at the end of each petal. This was the first to bloom that year, and my favorite since. I donated it to the hospice that cared for my grandmother after she passed the month before, and it was a big hit with the staff and residents. I keep hoping to sprout another like it.

Our zinnias over the years · More Info

A gradient hot pink full-dahlia variety the same year. Each flower was roughly the size of a squat tomato (or my fist) and yielded a good couple tablespoons of seeds each, though I don't know how many were properly fertilized. You can't see well in the photos but each had a gradient of deep purple to hot pink. Beautiful!

Our zinnias over the years · More Info

Average-sized flowers with bright purple and magenta petals, lime green on the underside. The innermost petals were curled to show off the green undersides from opening 'til wilting. The contrast of purple and green always made me think of a berry smoothie. Very quirky and unusual!

Our zinnias over the years · More Info

Hands down, the tiniest flowers I've ever seen on a Zinnia. These were somewhere between half-dollar and quarter sized, (definitely smaller than a silver dollar) and had only a handful of short, wide petals. The bright orange red had traces of pink that showed up in bright sunlight, and the contrast with the yellow centers was striking. These reminded me of tiny cloth buttons with ruffles on the outsides, or ruffled pillows.

Our zinnias over the years · More Info

Wow, I never imagined growing zinnias as a houseplant before. Good job on growing them indoors. I know nothing of the disease you mentioned.

I throw some seed in the ground and let Mother Nature sort it out. Some come up and do well but most never have a fighting chance (birds, squirrels, drought, etc.)

a bit disappointing that the plants are not just full of blooms though.

That does not look like Aster Yellows damage. And since AY is spread by leafhoppers, growing your zinnias indoors would tend to severely limit that possibility anyway.

I don't think it is yellows either. I have not seen it on Zinnias, but on other plants it is much more extreme and the flowers hardly look like flowers any more. As mentioned above, it would be unlikely to contract it inside anyway. Pests or nutrients or perhaps some household chemical would seem more likely.

@hc mcdole my loft has southern-facing windows and there aren't any other large buildings or objects blocking the sun, so I've been able to grow some plants normally not grown indoors. The zinnias were my first venture from typical houseplants - after a visit to the College of the Ozarks a few years ago, I received a packet of complimentary seeds from their greenhouse in the mail and sprouted some on a lark. Turns out zinnias work well indoors as long as they have enough light! I get new seeds every year, now, and love the color they bring to our living room. You've grown some real beauties - I LOVE those 'painted' ones! Gorgeous!

@gardengal48 (PNW Z8/9) I DO have an ongoing problem with some sort of bug but I haven't been able to get a positive ID on them. The closest I've come is Thrips but I'm not 100% certain. They're almost too tiny to be seen - I want to say maybe a little wider than a grain of salt and a few grains long. They vary in color from yellow-brown to blackish, probably different life stages, and some jump while others just lay there and wait to be smushed. I've tried photographing these but they're just too tiny to even focus on! I've gotten rid of them several times only for them to come back. Last time they were completely gone, I picked up some mums at Walmart, checked them over carefully, then a few days later they were infesting my catnip. It'd be easier to get rid of pests if I didn't have to worry about spraying pesticide indoors...we have cats and I have asthma.

@woodnative the fact that I couldn't find anything about aster yellows related to zinnias online threw me off, too. I can't think of any chemicals we've used near the zinnias every single year, unless it's the chlorine in our tapwater. For some reason the chlorine levels here are so high you can SMELL IT just by turning on the shower. It's nasty. As for nutrients, I generally use pre-packaged potting soil and add a little Osmocote after about a month or so. So, chlorine or bugs, it looks like, maybe?

I've scoured my photos for hours and STILL can't find any showing the ones the discoloration or any of the deformed purple ones. The only one I've been able to find is that giant pink one a couple years back that bloomed with an entire section of petals missing.

The petals never grew, and the center sort of curled under. The plant never produced healthy flowers and I eventually destroyed it.

Update, a question, and maybe an answer:

BUGS. Now that my brace is finally off, I gave the Zinnias a healthy lookover the other day. They. Were. CRAWLING with these bugs! As many as there were, I was finally able to get a couple of pictures of the little devils.

The plant I found the most bugs on:

There's no doubt in my mind now that this is a bug problem. What threw me off before was the idea that the bugs were going after the flowers along with the leaves, but the evidence is more than I can dismiss. Does anyone have any idea what the HECK these BUGS might be? Same bug in both pictures, just different stages of life.

Adult - brown, about the size of two grains of pretzel salt end-to-end. These have impressive range and speed when jumping and generally hang out on the undersides of the leaves. Squishing them often takes more than one try, and they tend to leap to freedom before you get a second chance. Rolling between or under fingertips seems to work. After I trimmed the damaged foliage off last night, I kept finding these little...uh...suckers on my shirt, arms, and table the rest of the night. I'm really hoping my sinus congestion today is seasonal allergies rather than bug-up-the-nose irritation.

Larvae (?) or otherwise "not yet an adult." These nasty little things look like worms but move more like...um...like they have legs? I don't know how to say it. They're about the same breadth of the adults but several times as long and run from yellow to brown and appear to have a shiny skin. They hang out on both the tops and bottoms of the leaves, on flower petals, and crawl instead of jump. They squish really easily and don't move very quickly.

(This obviously isn't a Zinnia. I planted a tape of "painted daisies" on a lark and instead, it sprouted some sort of poppy. I got one poppy to bloom before these little nasties murdered them.)

I've lost count of how many times I've succumbed to temptation in the nursery, scoured a plant, found it clean, and brought it home only to find THESE on it. The last time, they came in on my Mums last fall, but I could have sworn they were completely gone over winter. The only houseplant I kept overwinter (aside from my aloes) was the catnip and the garlic (dead and tossed) so it appears they survived in those and spread. This year, I let the catnip bolt to seed and plan on a clean reset - no plants in the window over-winter, scrubbing the windowsill and window, cleaning the curtains, and laying glue traps for any stragglers. I've had quite enough of these little nasties taking over!

So, here's the question. What the blue devil are these bugs, and what can I use to kill them off when they inevitably pop back up? My zinnias are practically bald from all the damaged foliage I had to cut off, and I'm not sure the plants will survive the damage. I'm happy it's not a disease (I can keep the seeds!) but my ability to kill bugs without physically squishing them has, so far, been pathetic. Anyone got any advice?

Hello Amanda,

Somehow my post yesterday did not raise this post to the first page of this Growing From Seed forum, so I will post a photo of another of my breeder zinnia examples to see if that will get the attention of the Houzz software.

Most, but not all, of my breeder zinnias have some tubular petaled ancestry. That specimen also had a variation of tubular petals.

ZM

PS That seems to have done the trick.

@zen_man first off, may I admit that your reference to the Borg made me cackle and scare my cats? That was awesome.

Regarding the bugs, yes, they do show up in significant numbers - somewhere between "this is worrisome" and "this plant needs to be burned." When the numbers get to the latter, I generally have to cut off almost all the foliage and flowers and buds and pray. Sometimes the plants bounce back. This year the infestation was too bad for any possible recovery; the only reason I managed to shoot one bug at a time was sheer luck, persistence, and HEAVY zoom. I found more of the blasted things crawling on my shirt and arms an hour later. Normally I'm not squeamish but that was enough to catapult me into the shower.

I've had aphids before (the one and only time I tried growing peppers, they came infested and spread everywhere!) and I've seen spider mites and their webs before. I've wondered about thrips because I also found these in my African Violets a few years before I figured out I can't grow them. (I read up on pests, found out African Violets are highly susceptible to thrips, and my bugs at the time matched the description. ...then I found out that there are several species of thrips and only a handful are harmful, but have yet to find a guide to which are harmful. Ugh.)

Regarding College of the Ozarks zinnias - I've gotten mostly small and compact varieties from the packets they send but some of the larger ones may also come from their greenhouses. I believe they send out packets to folks who donate as well as folks who visit the campus and sign their guest books. (I've heard their orchid house is a botanist's dream come true but have yet to see for myself.) Until I started sprouting their seeds, zinnias were some mysterious unknown plant to me that I expected looks like marigolds or daisies. The variety I've seen so far? I'm sold!

Regarding the water: since we use city water, it's most likely full of all kinds of nasty chemicals including fluoride. Since this was a mining region, there are probably traces of lead in there, too. I'm not sure about the source of the chlorine, though - my folks live in the same neighborhood and never notice the smell in their water but you can taste it in ours. I've taken to filling the watering can and leaving sit a few days for the chlorine to dissipate but it doesn't work miracles. Either way, I've decided to put a planter on the shared patio next spring to see if there's any change, and pick up some new insecticide when I get the chance. (Soil application is perfect since the bugs hide under the leaves.)

Regarding your photos, I've never seen anything like those! They're beautiful, and so unique. I particularly like how the orange one's middlemost petals look like a star. You've done excellent work on your breeding!

Hi Amanda,

Regarding the Borg, I didn't know if you would even know what that reference was to, and am delighted that it struck a chord with you. I have had problems with thrips getting on me, too. In parts of Florida thrips have been a problem for humans outdoors. We are in Kansas, so thrips find our outdoor weather a bit inhospitable. We don't have any cats or dogs (although both from our neighbors do pay us visits) and our poultry (chickens and guineas) stay outside.

" Since this was a mining region, there are probably traces of lead in there, too. "

Possibly. Hopefully very tiny traces. Our well is relatively shallow, and I think it is in the very top water table that may contain agricultural run-off filtered through a few layers of silt and sand. So it could contain some herbicides. We use the well water primarily to water our gardens. It does come indoors, so we take showers in it, and wash our dishes and clothes in it. We do not drink it or cook with it. We buy gallon jugs of drinking water from Walmart to drink and cook with. My indoor growing project raised a special problem. I didn't want to water my indoor zinnias with runoff herbicide, but we couldn't afford to use store-bought water for them either. So I bought an under-the-counter Reverse Osmosis Filtering System that I installed under the sink in our basement utility room. I have all of my indoor growing shelves and lights in that room. So I water my indoor plants with water that is actually better than rain water.

The chlorine and fluoride in your water probably don't hurt your plants. And both those are meant to benefit you.

" Until I started sprouting their seeds, zinnias were some mysterious unknown plant to me that I expected looks like marigolds or daisies. The variety I've seen so far? I'm sold! "

Commercial zinnia varieties come in a very good variety of sizes, shapes, and colors. The Tom Thumb variety puts out a first bloom when it is only 3 inches high. I prefer larger ones and "new" flower forms.

More later.

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

Hello again, Amanda,

Well, we watched the Dodgers win the World Series. That should be enough baseball to hold us until next year.

As I said, I prefer the larger zinnias, on taller larger plants. So I breed in that direction. There is a good variety in the commercial zinnias, like the zinnias at Swallowtail Seeds. The Zinderellas are representative of the newer scabiosa flowered zinnias. I have had problems with all of the scabiosa flowered zinnia strains coming true, but none worse than my experience with the Zinderellas. White is my favorite zinnia color, partly because it is a structural color, like snow is white but melts to clear water. A lot of the "regular" zinnia colors are produced by combinations of various organic dye-like compounds in the petals, but there is no white pigment involved in the white petals. There is refractive/reflective structure in the cells of the white petals, like the crystals in snow, that produce the appearance of white.

So I bought three packets of the White Zinderellas and planted a small bed of them. I got a lot of small white zinnia blooms, but not one of them had the true Zinderella scabious flower form. I planted other Zinderellas and got a few of the Zinderella colors, including a nice lavender. Scabiosa flowered zinnias make nice hybrids with other "regular" flowered zinnias. This is an example.

Incidentally the scabious parent of that hybrid was not a Zinderella. That cross was made a few years before the appearance of the Zinderellas. It has a combination of structural and organic coloring, which give a nice iridescent look. That lavender is a bit bluish, but not blue. I think some genetic engineering is going to be required to get true blue zinnias. That is a bit beyond my present talents. Well, it is my bedtime. More later.

ZM