Annuals: zinnia problem, 2 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
Hi, Amanda,

AmandaEsq wrote:I didn't crush it into the waste barrel though, waiting to hear from you all if my plant was worth a zillion bucks.

It's not worth a zillion bucks. I wouldn't call femina zinnias common, but they aren't extremely rare either, especially if you grow a lot of zinnias. I have discarded several in the last few years.

The original femina zinnia that an employee at W. Atlee Burpee discovered a few decades ago was valuable, because it made it possible to commercially produce F1 hybrid zinnias without having humans do the cross pollination. Now days F1 hybrid zinnia seed producers plant rows of feminas between rows of specially inbred male pollen producing zinnias, and the bees do the cross pollination on the feminas.

You can see the stigmas in your close-up pictures of your femina. The stigmas are the yellow Y-shaped tendrils that a pollen grain can germinate on to fertilize an ovum to produce a zinnia embryo. And, of course, there are no pollen florets on the femina.

AmandaEsq wrote: I guess I'm not sure what I'll get from these seeds if I save them, but that's your point. Like a box of chocolates.

Exactly. You never know what you are going to get with zinnias. When you buy a packet of field-grown zinnias, the seeds were pollinated primarily by bees. Some were selfed, as the bees accidentally shook pollen florets on the same zinnia, but some are cross-pollinated by the bees with pollen that they were already carrying.

So not only do you get a few F1 hybrids in your open pollinated packet of zinnia seeds, there were already some F1 hybrids in the seeds that the seed grower planted, also courtesy of the bees. So your open pollinated packet off of the seedrack can contain some hybrids between hybrids.

And, I can tell you from personal experience, that you can get some interesting results by crossing one F1 hybrid with a different F1 hybrid. In my case, I keep records, so I know at least something about the ancestry of my hybrid hybrids. But bees don't keep records, so their zinnias are full of surprises.

ZM