Hybridizers: It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 2, 1 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
Lucy,

"...but I, personally, don't care for that form, it reminds me of wilting flowers. that is just a personal thing..."

I got sort of the same impression when I saw my first real Echinaceas, although their down-sloping petals didn't particularly "turn me off". But all ornamental plants are subject to varying human preferences, and I agree with you that it's all subjective and it is good that we don't all like the same things.

I wasn't specifically breeding for the down-sloping petals, but when I saw them I thought, "that looks even more like an echinacea than most of my echinacea flowered specimens." As I am selecting for an echinacea flowered strain of zinnias, I will accept various down-sloping and up-sloping configurations for the long petals. Anything with a bushy center and longish petals will be accepted by me for that strain.

As you say, I don't prefer the singles and I do discard them. I have several queued up for discard processing right now. I pull them out of their pots and shake a lot of the growing medium off of them into a big bucket to re-use the growing medium. And I toss the rest in the trash, because I don't have a compost pile at the present time. Since we moved here to Wellsville, I am uncertain whether the town ordinances permit compost piles, although I will look into that. I always had at least one compost pile going in Maine, and sometimes as many as four.

As I mentioned, not all of my echinacea specimens have those steeply down-sloped petals. This attached picture is a current example. Admittedly, it looks a bit more like a sunflower than an echinacea. But its central florets qualify it as a "keeper" for me.

ZM