Hybridizers: It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 3, 0 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
Arlan,

Based on your WordPress gallery, I am very impressed with your results from the scabiosa flowered zinnias you got from Cooks. I made a mental note to buy some seeds from them. With respect to your scabiosa flowered picture here, I think you can see at least a couple of visible yellow stigmas in the florets near the center of the picture. The anatomy of scabiosa flowered zinnias can present various functional forms, but in this case those stigmas may already have been pollinated from anthers inside the tube of the floret, or some of the stigmas may have emerged before the pollen was available and still be "open" for pollination with pollen that you might apply.

In either case, you might find some viable pollen in the anthers inside the tubes of the florets. You have to mess up the floret to get at that pollen, but in many cases I perform surgery of sorts in order to pollinate inaccessible scabiosa stigmas and in order to gain access to inaccessible scabiosa pollen on anthers.

It looks like you are off to a great start with your zinnia project. I am not attracted to your single Ruffles specimens, but everything else looks good, with several good candidates for breeders, and a really good assortment of scabiosa flowered specimens. Incidentally, your white or ivory Whirligig is a bit off-type with no obvious bicolor color pattern, but it has slender "toothy" petals that I like. I can't wait to see what some of your F1 hybrids are going to look like.

The attached picture is one of my recent recombinants. At first glance, it has a rather conventional cactus-flowered look, but it has an "open" flower form with corrugated petals that have down-curled "teeth" on the ends. I like open flower forms that don't have their petals stacked too close. Closely packed petals could provide hiding places for aphids.

ZM