Hybridizers: It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 6, 5 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
Greetings to all,

Welcome to this continuing message thread. The previous part of this ongoing series, It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 5, has over 150 messages and has become rather long and slow to load, so we are continuing it here for a fresh start. If you want, you can access the Part 5 thread through this link http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/1275654/ and it, in turn, has a link to the part before it, and so on. As always, your participation and comments here are most welcome.

In the time since the beginning of Part 5, I have added the toothy tubular (exotic) zinnias, which were created by crossing my tubular zinnias with the star-tipped mutant. I have also added the Razzle Dazzle zinnia type, which was created by crossing the star-tipped mutant with cactus zinnias. The Razzle Dazzle zinnias closely resemble the Razzle Dazzle strain of Gaillardias.

I am also growing commercial Burpeeana Giant zinnias (from Stokes), Benary's Giant zinnias, and California Giants zinnias(also called Giants of California) in order to add their genes to my gene pool. I can't help wondering what crossing a Razzle Dazzle zinnia with a Benary's Giant zinnia will result in.

Pic #1 is a yellow Razzle Dazzle. Pic #2 is a scarlet tipped yellow Razzle Dazzle. Pic #3 is a current tubular recombinant. Pic #4 is a current aster flowered recombinant. Pic #5 is a current Burpeeana Giants selected specimen, with one of those hard-to-name "paint chip" zinnia colors.

More later. As before, your comments, questions, and zinnia pictures are always welcome.

ZM