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

Zen_Man wrote:
Corey,

Ball-like or spherical zinnia blooms (like in this attached picture, which I first showed quite some time ago) can have a nice look, particularly if they are on a similarly shaped plant, a bush that has a more spherical or hemispherical dome shape.

"Could cold conditions or insufficent fertilizer and compost make a "double" bloom come out "single"?"

I think so. The Park Seed catalog suggested that transplanting a double zinnia could make it single. If you dig a zinnia up, and move it somewhere else, there is certainly loss of roots and disturbance to the remaining roots (root hairs are quite delicate). But I don't do that with my zinnias that I start indoors. I let them get a little root-bound in the pot, and then the whole rootball slips out as an integral unit that I can place in the ground with no root disturbance at all.

There is a lot to learn about the art and the science of growing zinnias. I continue to learn more in that area all the time, and realize that I have a lot more to learn and a lot of experimentation to do.

Back to the round ball zinnia bloom subject, I think they can look quite good and that could be a very good flower form. However, I prefer that petals not be so massively overlapping as they are in this picture. I would like to have spherical blooms with spikey or narrow petals, to let a lot more air into the bloom. The classic zinnia blooms, with petals that closely overlap like shingles, provide a lot of concealed internal space in which bad bugs (like aphids and thrips) can live. And a dark, hidden environment between closely packed petals could be favorable to some molds and mildews.

But I do like the overall ball shape of the zinnia in this picture. Zinnias tend to vary and be genetically malleable, so that you can influence them a lot by selecting the ones you like and selfing and inter-crossing them, and save those seeds. Oklahoma is an improved Cut-and-Come-Again zinnia, and they can have some nice ball-like blooms. That would be something that you could select for, to get ever more spherical blooms.

"I'm starting to think that "Lilliput" are closest to what I want."

Their blooms are ball-like, but they have small blooms. I grew some Gem zinnias this year, which are basically Lilliputs on a more compact plant, and they had disappointingly tiny blooms. A lot of their blooms were only one-half to three quarters of an inch in diameter. You can get larger ball-like zinnias without being forced into really tiny flowers. It's not easy to show more than one picture at a time here on Dave's Garden, so I will elaborate on this in additional messages, mainly because I need to show some additional illustrative pictures.

ZM