Annuals: zinnia problem, 3 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
Hi, Amanda,

Femina zinnias are the mother of all commercial F1 zinnias, so if you want them you can simply do the "forbidden" thing of saving seeds from commercial F1 hybrid zinnias. A fraction of those saved seeds can produce feminas, as well as a variety of other zinnias, somewhat related to your original F1 hybrid zinnias.

Feminas are obviously not very desirable themselves, unless you want to create your own F1 hybrid seeds. Any seeds that you save from your femina zinnia will be F1 hybrids, except unless you pollinated them yourself, they will have been pollinated by bees and you will have no idea where the bees got their pollen. The seed yield on your feminas may be low, unless you or your neighbors had a lot of "regular" zinnias around. You might want to save seeds from your femina to get a surprising "grab bag" of F1 hybrid zinnias next year.

This year I had a mutant zinnia that had tubular petals ending in a 5-pointed star. The tips of the star prongs were brownish, although not so on the newly forming buds. It looked kind of ugly, but it did have petals with a unique shape for zinnias. I crossed it (I designated that breeder zinnia as G13) extensively with several different specimens of my current tubular-petaled strain, which is still under development. This year many of my tubular zinnia petals had rather plain ends.

I hope the genes from this G13 mutant can recombine with my current breeder zinnias (coded G1 through G53) to create some nice new petal forms. I am hoping to get rid of the brown tips, but get the five-points on the ends of my tubular petals. Next year I should have some interesting stuff in my zinnia garden.

ZM