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.
I described my encounter with a "tubular-petaled mutant zinnia" In a previous message thread. That was in 2011 and it added a lot of interest and progress to my zinnia breeding hobby. You don't really expect a zinnia mutation, so when you find one, it is an exciting surprise.
Last year I planted a bed of commercial white cactus zinnias, hoping to find at least a few really good big white zinnias that I would save seeds from. One morning, when I was inspecting that bed to see if any good white specimens had appeared yet, I found this zinnia mutation.
It was a single white zinnia with very strange petals. They were tubular with a fairly large tube diameter and the ends of petals had five points, like a star.
I was concerned that the brown tips on the star tips were almost certainly genetic, but I couldn't let this opportunity go by, so I cross-pollinated it extensively with my breeder zinnias. Last winter I grew some of those seeds indoors in the utility room in the basement, where I had several chrome wire shelves set up with fluorescent shoplights for illumination. I grew zinnias indoors there from mid October to mid May of this year, and that was enough time to grow two full generations of zinnias indoors during the Winter. That let me see the results of the crosses with the star-tipped mutant and to grow some samples of F2 recombinants from those crosses.
The crosses with tubular petaled zinnias yielded tubular petaled zinnias with points on the flare-out end of the petal.
I was glad to see some white on the outside of some of the pointy tubes.
The star-tipped mutant was definitely adding a lot of interest to my tubular petaled zinnias.
The "ugly duckling" tubular petaled zinnias were definitely moving in the direction of becoming a "beautiful swan".
The star-tipped tubular petaled zinnias definitely have potential to become a good strain, as their color range and bloom sized are increased by more cross pollination and selection.
But when I crossed the star-tipped mutant with "regular" zinnias (not tubular petaled), a strange (and very surprising thing to me) new zinnia resulted. I'll go into that development in my next message in this thread. More later.
ZM
