Hi Teresa,
It is a little cool outside this morning, so I will discuss triploid zinnias now. I think there actually is, or was, a commercial triploid marigold. Its "claim to fame" was that it didn't set viable seeds, so it didn't need deadheading and could grow bigger better plants with more blooms and longer lasting blooms, because it didn't waste its energy producing seeds.
In the case of zinnias, triploidy can produce some notable results. A case in point is my "shrub zinnia". It appeared in a bed of my cactus flowered zinnias in 2011 as a medium sized orange cactus bloom. At first I didn't notice anything unusual about it, but by the end of August I couldn't not notice it, because its plant had become a sprawling bush covered with blooms.
The plant was still a growing expanding thing at the time those pictures were made. It got considerably larger. At that time triploidy hadn't even entered my mind about it, and I considered it as a mutant zinnia with a very unique shrub-like plant. It was producing a sparse amount of pollen, but I used it every morning, and pollinated its many blooms with pollen from a wide variety of my breeder zinnias at that time. I do that for any notable zinnia mutant. Incidentally, its breeder designation was E13 and that Fall I collected several thousand seeds from E13's over-a-hundred seed heads.
I discard my zinnia plants to our local landfill each Fall (I have two contractor bags full and taped and waiting for our trash pickup tomorrow) to cut down on spreading zinnia diseases, and when I was pulling up E13 for Fall cleanup I discovered that it had many branches lying horizontally on the ground and each of them had sprouted its own root system along a considerable length of each branch. Zinnias can develop an extensive main root system off of their taproot, but the root system on E13 was almost tree-like. I wondered if I had the potential for creating a ground-cover zinnia.
I also had serious misgivings about growing shrub zinnias indoors, because a single plant could easily overflow one of my plant shelves. But I thought, worst case, I could put the pot on the concrete floor of the basement and put an HID lamp on the ceiling over it. So I planted a tray of E13 seeds along with many other trays of indoor breeders that Fall. I was almost relieved when none of them germinated. I planted a few of them in subsequent years, also with no germination. So I was becoming suspicious this year, and I planted my entire supply of several thousand E13 seeds in outdoors beds this Spring. Not a single plant emerged. That is when it finally dawned on me that E13 must have been a triploid.
My E13 triploid zinnia raised questions of whether a shrub zinnia or a ground-cover zinnia was even a good thing. But triploid zinnias are "a thing", and you might want to consider them as a source of cut flowers. A hundred zinnia blooms from a single zinnia plant is a definite possibility. But it is probably easier to just grow a hundred zinnia plants.
ZM
