abhege said:I have been growing Whirlygig for severl years. Zowie came after as a sort of copycat but I like the whirlygig much better and I have had some success saving seeds too.
Zowie does have Whirligig-type coloration and it is an AAS award winning F1 hybrid, which makes its seeds expensive. I don't like Zowie's tall petal-less central cone, which kind of reminds me of a plucked chicken. But that tall cone does bear pollen florets every day, much to the delight of butterflies and bees. So for a butterfly garden, Zowie is hard to beat, except for that high seed price.
A few years ago I grew a zinnia variety called Zig Zag. It had bicolor and tricolor petals like Whirligig and this is pic of a Zig Zag that had Zowie's color combination in a full dahlia flowered flowerform.
Zig Zag has been discontinued for several years now, and I used up almost all of my old Zig Zag seed this year, looking for something exceptional, with no luck. However, I will always have a warm spot in my heart for Zig Zag, because in 2011 I discovered a tubular petaled mutant in my Zig Zag bed. Because it was so different, I went "nuts", crossing it with practically every "good" zinnia in my zinnia patch. For several years I have been an amateur zinnia breeder, and a find like that was very exciting to me. This is an old picture of that original tubular petaled zinnia, which I had given the code-name "E2".
The next year, 2012, I grew out a large bed of the hybrids I had made between the tubular mutant, E2, and practically every zinnia that I had designated as a "breeder" zinnia in 2011. Much to my amazement and disappointment, I didn't find any tubular zinnias in those F1 hybrids between my breeders and the E2 tubular mutant. I had a whole big garden full of "failures".
I was feeling pretty "bummed out" but I saved seeds from those F1 hybrids anyway, and that Winter, when I was shucking those seedheads and picking out the good fat seeds, something suddenly occurred to me. What I had just proved was that the tubular petal genes were recessive, and that I should see recombinations of them in the F2 seeds I was just packaging. So in 2013 I made big plantings of those F2 seeds, in hope that the theoretical genetic recombinations would recover the tubular petals.
I always have some feeling of suspense when a new zinnia bloom is about to open. What will it look like? That's part of the enjoyment of growing zinnias. But in the Spring of 2013, my anticipation was at a fever pitch. And then one day, the first several zinnia blooms opened. But my heart sank, as bloom after bloom opened, with no tubular petals. Oh, there were nice colors and some nice "regular" zinnia flower forms, but no tubulars.
Then, I think it was on the third day, a tubular bloom opened. I was overjoyed. I felt certain there would be more. And there were. I have several pictures of tubular recombinant zinnias to show, and I will start a new thread to show them. But so as not to keep you in suspense, here is a sample.
The color was different. The tubes had a different configuration. This was not to be a "one trick pony". This was the beginning of a new phase in my zinnia hobby. I will be starting a new message thread to continue this story, rather than hijack this message thread.
ZM
