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Sep 9, 2014 11:39 PM CST
Name: ZenMan
Kansas (Zone 5b)
Kansas 5b
Annuals Enjoys or suffers cold winters Region: United States of America Seed Starter Keeper of Poultry Hybridizer
Hummingbirder Dragonflies Garden Photography Butterflies Zinnias Garden Ideas: Level 2
Hello all,

I have been growing zinnias for several years, saving seeds from my favorites, and even hybridizing them myself. Actually, hybridizing zinnias is surprisingly easy. That evolved into my current hobby of breeding zinnias.

In 2011, I was inspecting my patch of Zig Zag zinnias when I saw something strange (Zig Zags are now discontinued, but they were somewhat similar to Whirligigs). It was a zinnia with rather small red blooms, but the petals were composed of narrow tubes, reminiscent of soda straws. I took pictures of it.

Thumb of 2014-09-10/ZenMan/3b0ca5

Thumb of 2014-09-10/ZenMan/595754

The blooms were only a little over an inch in diameter, but I was excited about the unique flower form. So I put a small tomato cage around the plant to protect it, and started crossing it with other larger zinnias that I had in my main zinnia garden. I designated it by the codename E2 in my garden journal of breeder zinnias.

Every morning I would gather pollen florets from E2 and take them to other zinnias to apply the pollen. I saved seeds from those zinnias and the next year, 2012, I grew a lot of the seeds from those crosses, hoping to see some interesting tubular-petaled hybrids. I was surprised and disappointed when no tubular-petaled zinnias appeared in those F1 hybrids.

When I was shucking zinnia seedheads that Winter, it suddenly occurred to me that the tubular petaled trait must simply be recessive, and that I had a lot of tubular petaled genes in the F2 seeds I was packaging for planting the following year.

In 2013, the first few blooms from that F2 generation were not tubular petaled and I was worried. But on about the third day of new blooms there were two or three tubular petaled blooms. And that was just the beginning. For the next month new versions of the tubular petaled trait continued to appear.

The tubular petaled genes had combined with the genes of my other zinnias in the non-tubular F1 hybrids and recombined in the F2 generation to produce some tubular blooms several different ways, including bigger blooms, different colors, and some variations in the tubular petals themselves. There were enough different versions of the tubular petals that it seemed very likely that more than one gene was determining the form of the recombinant tubular blooms.

I will show some pictures of the tubular petaled recombinant zinnias in some of the next few messages. More later.

ZM

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