Hybridizers: It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 4, 0 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
j,

"Is that common as the color seems to be?"

The color is fairly common, but the marigold flower form is very rare in zinnias. In fact, I have never seen the marigold flower form in any zinnia that did not have scabiosa flowered ancestry. When I first saw the scabiosa flowered zinnias years ago, I was unimpressed by their small flower size. I crossed them with larger flowered zinnias in an effort to increase their size, but I was surprised and delighted by some of the new flower forms that appeared in their recombinants.

"Although the form never seems to breed true."

They certainly don't breed 100% true. Even the commercial Candy Mix strain has that problem. But I cull and remove the off-type ones and intercross the ones that show desirable scabiosa influenced flower forms, and I get a reasonably good yield of "scabi" recombinants. And I have been seeing some unexpected desirable new zinnia traits in the scabi offspring that don't relate to the flower form.

For example, the zinnia pictured here (with my shorthand code of E13) was grown from a seed from a specimen coded as C72, and C72 was described in my notebook as a "semi-echinacea flowered magenta pink". So it was a scabi recombinant grown from a petal seed from a previous scabi coded as C46. (With scabis, I sometimes distinguish between petal seeds, which could be cross pollinated, and floret seeds, which are almost always selfed.) The flowers on this zinnia were a rather common medium-sized cactus flowered form. It had a good orange color, and it wasn't taking up space from any nearby choice specimens, so I spared it while I was culling that planting, and pretty much ignored it for over a month.

Then I noticed that its plant was spreading like a shrub in a very un-zinnia-like fashion, so I changed my opinion of it, gave it breeder status, and assigned the next-in-line code of E13 to it. It continued to sprawl, eventually reaching over 5 feet across in some directions. It produced dozens of blooms. It had very little pollen, so I wasn't able to self it a lot, but I did cross pollinate it with a variety of my breeders. I am curious to see if its shrub-like plant habit shows up in any of its progeny next year. I may plant a few of its seeds in my indoor zinnia garden this Winter, although I have no idea how I would care for a 5-foot zinnia shrub in my basement under fluorescent lights. I have never had a zinnia plant like this before, so it adds to the suspense in my zinnia breeding hobby. I haven't decided if a shrub plant habit is even a good thing in a zinnia, but it adds interest to next year's zinnia gardening.

ZM


This message was edited Oct 26, 2011 9:08 AM