Hi Loretta,
Thanks for your kind words.
If you are interested in doing some zinnia breeding of your own, I would be glad to provide information and counseling on that. Many, perhaps all, of the commercial heirloom zinnia strains have "run out" in many decades of seed production field growing. So one easy way to enter zinnia breeding is to grow some of an heirloom strain, expecting to see a large number of "off-type" culls, and simply save seed from the best few specimens that you get. You might make some crosses between your best specimens. I am currently growing a couple of 4-row beds of California Giants Mix, and I am curious to see whether I get any good on-type specimens out of that.
I have been pursuing this zinnia hobby since 2005, so understandably I have made some progress and had a couple of lucky mutations show up. I have a zinnia strain under development that I refer to as Razzle Dazzle and one variant of that strain is a nearly globe-shaped bloom, something like an Allium (flowering onion). It is an unusual "look" for a zinnia.
As with all All-Things-Plants pictures, you can click on it for a larger version, and see it a bit larger still by hitting your F11 key (to remove your Browser's heading material). That gray background is the out-of-focus concrete wall of the basement utility room where I grow my indoor zinnias. That indoor-grown bloom is fairly mature and I suspect that I can save seeds from it now to plant outdoors in my zinnia garden. I will be very curious to see how its seeds turn out. That kind of suspense is one of the advantages of breeding your own zinnias. It makes the daily trip into the zinnia garden interesting, and sometimes an adventure. You never know when an exciting mutation will appear. More later.
ZM
