JG,
"You are getting close!! If you cover the ruffles in the middle, it almost looks like a chicory flower. I guess you harvested the seeds. It will be really interesting to see what you get in the next generation from that plant!"
In the excitement of the zinnia seed sale, I forgot to respond to part of your message. I did indeed save quite a few seeds from that lavender-blue echinacea flowered F1. Like all of the echinacea flowered series, it had a scabiosa flowered female parent and a "selected" large flowered Burpee Hybrid or Burpeeana Giant male parent. I planted a few of the seeds for my second generation Fall crop and the F2s varied all over the place.
When the parents of an F1 cross are widely different, as was the case with all of my scabiosa flowered crosses except for my scabi-X-scabi scabiosa hybrids, the F2 children vary wildly and display combinations of factors that neither the selfed parent nor the grandparents had. It's an interesting complex phenomenon explainable by Probability Theory applied to genetics. Suffice it to say, it happens.
The F2s are interesting new specimens, but they rarely have the "right" combination of genes, so they are for the most part disappointing and candidates for the compost pile. The F2 posted on Sun, Sep 30, 07 at 23:18 was actually one of the children of the blue-lavender echinacea flowered F1, and the remaining half dozen or so specimens were various odd little pastel flowered daisy-like specimens. All of them went to the compost pile.
Hopefully next year I will be able to plant a whole bed of F2s from that blue-lavender F1 specimen, and maybe I will get something useful out of a much larger sample. However, I think the chances of getting a pure sky blue are pretty near zero, even if I planted a million of them.
"Did you try and self-cross it? Or choose other parents?"
I did both. I crossed its guard petals with other echinacea flowered specimens and selected "upgrades" and allowed most of its disk florets to self-fertilize naturally.
The disk florets of scabiosa-derived specimens are interesting intermediates between regular zinnia petals and the furry-yellow pollen florets of conventional zinnias. They are at least partially hermaphroditic, and some of them produce pollen and their style acts as a modified stigma which receives it, producing a selfed seed just as the regular yellow pollen florets of standard zinnias frequently produce a selfed seed.
Others of them have vestigial infertile pollen and extend a rather identifiable stigma which can be pollinated like the stigma of a conventional ray floret petal. There are intermediate forms that can apparently function either way, and I frequently use my mosquito forceps to tear the floret enough to expose a style-stigma for cross pollination. I have performed that procedure on some pure-bred scabiosa flowered specimens as well, to cross pollinate more than just the guard petals.
I am still learning about these intermediate floret-petals. The marigold flowered variants have many more open-shaped toothy disk florets with readily accessible near-conventional stigmas, but the florets toward the center of the flower transition toward a more tubular form. I think you can see that in both the Sun, Sep 30, 07 at 22:28 picture and the Sun, Sep 30, 07 at 22:39 picture.
This zinnia breeding hobby continues to be a learning experience for me.
MM
Q
zinnia hybridizing ideas
Q