Hybridizers: It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 4, 1 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
Lucy,

Glad to have you back. It's true that zinnias have a wider color range than marigolds, but the colors that Corey listed as his favorites are yellow and orange and those colors are available in both marigolds and zinnias. Zinnias can mimic the flower forms of marigolds in a much wider color range, but not their fine dark green foliage.

Actually, the most difficult goal that Corey has is the plant form with long stems originating from the base, instead of the multi-branched form that zinnias (and marigolds) tend to have. Corey is breeding for cut flowers, so he wants each flower to have its own long stem. That's not going to be easy to achieve, and when he achieves it, he is really going to have something unique in a plant form. I have seen some strange zinnia plant forms, so what Corey is going for isn't necessarily impossible.

"I have seen some what I call 'regular' zinnias as we drive near our house. They seem to have finished bloom, no frost as yet."

Zinnias decline rapidly in the Fall, even before a frost ends the growing season. I used to think that the decline was because they were setting seed. But, in recent years, I have seen zinnia specimens that continued to put out youthful looking blooms even though many older blooms on the plant had matured, set seed, and even turned brown with a dead stem. So the act of seed setting need not spell the end for a zinnia plant, or its flowering season. However, in the cool short-day weather of Fall, zinnias can be literally "eaten up" by powdery mildew (or other foliage diseases), before the actual event of a killing freeze. That may be why the zinnias you saw seemed to have finished blooming.

How about a plum-colored marigold-flowered zinnia?

ZM