Annuals: New Zinnia Page, 0 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
BB,

I really wonder if that Violet Queen zinnia will look as purple as that seed packet when the actual flowers bloom out. To me, the seed packet picture looks unrealistically blue-purple, but I hope I am wrong. I would like to get a zinnia in that color.

Some lavender zinnias can look bluish when they bloom in the shade. I have actually seen some zinnias that looked almost sky blue until the sun got to them and the coloration gained a magenta tint into the blue-lavender. In 2006 I had an echinacea flowered hybrid zinnia that showed some sky blue tendencies in its petals. A few days after this picture was taken it got some full sun and the petals became more lavender. But for a few days there it teased me with its hint-of-blue color. It was part scabiosa flowered, so the central florets were colored, but not the same color as the petals.

Incidentally, the explanation for the poor quality of this picture is that I didn't have access to a digital camera at that time, so I used my video camera to take short 5-second videos and then did frame grabs from those short videos to get still pictures. This particular picture was cropped from a video frame and then upsampled to increase the pixel count, so that accounts for the lack of detail in the picture. There just weren't enough pixels to start with. I hope to get a decent digital SLR camera this year to improve the quality of my zinnia pictures.

ZM