Hybridizers: It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 6, 1 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
Hi Robin,

My zinnias continue to produce interesting results. That first picture is a pair of similar blooms that have the same maternal parent (which I guess makes them siblings). They are on different plants. The interesting thing is that the second picture was taken of their maternal parent (code-named I49). I49 was a \"Woolly\" specimen that I treated as a tubular petaled zinnias and removed most of its petals to expose their internal stigmas for cross pollination. The chosen male parents were California Giants and Benary\'s Giants. Those crosses combined genes from some very different parents. So those first two zinnias are very interesting F1 hybrids. They have the potential for producing some totally new zinnia types in their F2 progeny, in which novel recombinations of genes are the rule. My zinnia project continues to fascinate me. More later. It may be below zero here in the morning.

ZM