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

Zen_Man wrote:
Corey,

Several of the colors in that first chart look definitely "off" on my monitor, also. I think the violet may be named with respect to the flower, rather than the prism spectrum. I agree with you about the chocolate being off. It is too light and orangey. For chocolate, I think of a Hershey's chocolate bar, and in the HTML table the colors they call Sienna or Saddle Brown come closer to a "true" Chocolate. I, too, see only a slight difference between their "Magenta" and "Fuschia". Maybe we should be looking at Pantone color charts. They are what magazines and book publishers refer to.

One of the first "successful" zinnia crosses I made was back in 2006 in Maine when I crossed a scabiosa flowered zinnia with a large Whirligig. The result had a flower form I hadn't seen before in a zinnia, and I referred to it then as "sunflower flowered", because of the huge fat center it had, composed of "scabi" type florets, "piled high". I don't have an established strain of sunflower flowered zinnias yet, but I am seeing specimens of them fairly frequently in my scabi-derived recombinants. A recent one is pictured here, in which the full, almost hemispherical center is evident.

ZM