Zen: I didn't pick the actual plants, I just pick a few flowers here and there to ensure they keep blooming. My primary reason for growing them is to beautify the front porch area and for cut flowers. I was kinda unaware that the naturally/randomly pollinated flowers from last year wouldn't produce flowers of the same color next year, so the results were unexpected. These plants are now nearing 5 feet tall and will continue growing. The tallest flowers reached over 7 feet last year! They get at least 9 hours of direct sun this time of year too. Odd.

Anyway, what do pollen florets look like and how do I actually do the manual pollination? I have never tried manual pollination except for indoors with citrus plants in poor light, which failed to produce fruit, probably due to poor light. Even a 250w MH fixture was ineffective.

to produce a given child.. you have to know the mother and father ...

you do not know either .. so the odds of recreating what you have... are very low ...

and sooner or later over the generations of these plants ... the genetics of your perfect plant.. are going to fail .... going from i call.. the foo foo.. back in time.. to its more simpler forms ....

its basic genetics ... and you cant believe the record keeping needed... to make the process predictable ...

it should be rather easy to google any of the terms that zen gave you .. e.g. pics or drawings of the flower parts you are wanting to learn about...

ken

Hi Highlander,

" I didn't pick the actual plants, I just pick a few flowers here and there to ensure they keep blooming. "

They will keep blooming as long as you keep them well nourished and watered. I use MiracleGro Bloom Booster during the blooming season, because it has the extra phosphorus that blooming and seed setting requires. Each of those blooms that you picked has probably at least two dozen viable stigmas waiting to be pollinated. Those two picked blooms represent possibly 50 seeds or more that you could have had. And right now the petals lower in the blooms may have a few that were randomly pollinated. If you still have those blooms, don't toss them out until you pluck every petal looking for viable green seeds. This picture shows you how you can tell a plump viable green seed from a flatish empty discard. Notice that the viable green seeds are attached to petals that have all of their color. No brown stuff here. You can see a few dead stigmas.

" Anyway, what do pollen florets look like ... ? "
This next picture shows you what you need to know about the male parts of a zinnia bloom (the pollen florets) and the female parts of the zinnia bloom (the stigmas). The pollen florets look like fuzzy yellow starfish, and the stigmas look like yellow Y-shaped tendrils. For a clearer view, click on the picture for a larger version and hit your F11 key to hide your browser's headings. Close the picture to return here, and hit your F11 key again when you want your browser headings back. " ...and how do I actually do the manual pollination? "

Using tweezers or forceps (the picture shows the use of forceps) to pick a pollen floret.

And use it as a brush to brush pollen on the stigmas of the female bloom.
Another way is to use an artists brush to transfer the pollen. To "load" the brush, simply touch the tip of the brush to the center of the pollen floret, where, if you are early, there may appear a little pile of yellow pollen.
Then touch the tip of the artists brush to stigmas on the chosen female bloom. You can probably fertilize several stigmas with a single brush load. After all, it can take only one pollen grain on a stigma to fertilize it.
It is best to do your pollination and cross-pollinations early enough in the morning to catch the pollen florets just opening. They will open a little later on a cloudy day. But working earlier gives you a head start on the bees.

" I have never tried manual pollination except for indoors with citrus plants in poor light... "

I also grow zinnias indoors (not so easy indoors, because zinnias are not house plants), and zinnia pollination goes just fine indoors or outside. The green seed technique is key to getting more than one generation of zinnias per year, and it also avoids possible pre-germination losses in extended wet weather and reduces your losses from seed-eating birds.

You might be interested in the "It can be fun to breed your own zinnias" message threads here in the Annuals forum. Don't hesitate to ask questions either here or over in the It can be fun... threads. You have the advantage of communicating with other zinnia hobbyists over there. It never hurts to get a second or a third opinion on something.

ZM

Highlander, here are the threads that ZM was referring to. As far as I'm concerned, they are must read for anyone interested in the science and art of zinnia (or other plants) breeding.

They are fascinating for anyone to browse through!

Thanks Zen for your clarity. That made it easy to grasp. My primary plant focus has been dahlias since about 2006. I grow larger dahlia plants and save their tubers over winter and grow them again each new season. I am growing about 6 new varieties of dahlias this year, but this is also the first year I am attempting to grow a dahlia crossbreed from seeds. We'll see how that goes. From what I understand, most don't grow pretty flowers. Supposedly it's fairly difficult to get a good looking new dahlia breed from seed.

If I were to catch a new freshly opened flower bud from the thread related zinnia, and I were to carefully pollinate it manually using pollen from another flower from the same plant, and then isolate it from further pollination by bees carrying pollen from other plants, will it produce flowers with seeds that produce plants with flowers that look the same as these?

Are zinnias pollinated by wind or by incidental contact with each other or only by insect or bird pollination?

This is my 5th year growing these Burpee giant flowered mix zinnias. This is the first year I've grown seeds produced by plants from the prior year. The crazy thing is that I had no yellow flowers at all last year, but I ended up with a lemon yellow single this year, which came from a thick double flower that was velvety red! I also have an orange double with pink on the base area of each petal. I got rid of a plant that grew greenish white singles. But most of the plants have nicely colored flowers, although there are a few singles mixed in. Roughly 2/3 are doubles.

If you look at the bottom 2 pictures from my follow up post here you'll see some of the flower colors, but they were just starting to bloom then and weren't yet fully opened.

Hi Highlander,

" Supposedly it's fairly difficult to get a good looking new dahlia breed from seed. "

Yes, dahlia breeding, like rose breeding, and most breeding of asexually propagated ornamentals, proceeds by making crosses between hybrids of hybrids of hybrids, ad nauseum. So the existing specimens that you grow and cross-pollinate are themselves highly heterogeneous. So your dahlia crosses will product highly recombined progeny, and they will be full of surprises, most of them rather disappointing, depending on your standards and goals.

" If I were to catch a new freshly opened flower bud from the thread related zinnia, and I were to carefully pollinate it manually using pollen from another flower from the same plant, and then isolate it from further pollination by bees carrying pollen from other plants, will it produce flowers with seeds that produce plants with flowers that look the same as these? "

Many will be similar, a few will be noticeably different, and a few will be approximately the same. Zinnia populations (like many things) are a Bell Curve kind of thing, with average quality specimens in the head of the bell and a few really good (desirable) and a few really bad (undesirable) specimens in the tails of the bell. Depending on your standards, it takes 5 to 7 generations of careful selection to produce a reasonably pure strain of a zinnia. You aren't going to "get there" in a single generation.

I have found a serendipitous thing about trying to stabilize a target strain of zinnias. The random recombinations of genes that appear in your specimens will produce a few specimens that are reasonably similar to your "target" for the strain, but you can get a few recombinants that are actually improvements to your target, and those will usually cause you to redefine your target and self them. Sometimes you will get more than one new target in that process. That is why I frequently say that zinnias are full of surprises.

As an example, in my zinnia breeding a few years ago I set out to develop a stable strain of a tubular petaled mutant. The starting point had a red color:

and I wanted the strain to have all zinnia colors and larger blooms, so I crossed the red tubular with many different colors of larger zinnias to produce a generation of F1 hybrids. Alarmingly, those produced a variety of different colors and sizes in the F1 generation, but the tubular petal form was gone. I hoped that the tubular trait was just recessive, so I selfed and re-crossed the F1's to produce my F2's and, sure enough, the tubular trait reappeared in a variety of colors and sizes.

But I also got recombinant tubulars with much slimmer tubes, and these suggested a second "target" for my tubular project.

Zinnias can be full of surprises.

" Are zinnias pollinated by wind or by incidental contact with each other or only by insect or bird pollination? "

Zinnia pollen grains are too big and heavy to be considered wind pollinated, but air currents within a zinnia bloom can move pollen grains within a bloom. It is unlikely that wind will do any significant amount of pollination between different blooms. Gravity can also carry loose zinnia pollen down from a pollen floret to stigmas below it. Hummingbirds, butterflies, skippers, and day-flying moths seem to get the zinnia nectar from the florets with minimal disturbance, so they are a minor contributor to pollination. Incidental contact could contribute a minor amount of gravity or micro wind current pollination. Bee disturbance, combined with gravity or micro wind currents are probably the main pollination mechanisms. And, of course, the pollen florets are internally pollinated to produce the selfed floret seeds. A pollen floret contains an internal anther bundle and a stigma that pushes up through it to push the pollen out and that stigma usually gets self-pollinated in the process.

" The crazy thing is that I had no yellow flowers at all last year, but I ended up with a lemon yellow single this year, which came from a thick double flower that was velvety red! "

Yes, the genetic process of recombination can reveal previously hidden traits. Zinnias are full of surprises.

ZM

I know this is an older thread but I found this page by looking for information on crossing my own zinnias this year. I am so excited from all that I've learned and I've saved your posts for future reference. Thank you so much for sharing your helpful experience and insights!

Hi BunnysGarden,

This is indeed a 5-years old thread. There are several other more recent threads that also touch on the activity of breeding zinnias in the home garden. One such thread is It can be fun to breed your own zinnias (that is a clickable link.) I have developed some new zinnia flower forms in the last 5 years. This photo is a sample. (You can click on the photos to see larger versions.)

Botanically, any part of a plant that is capable of producing a seed is a "flower", and since each zinnia petal can have a seed at its base, each zinnia petal is botanically a flower. In this example the individual zinnia petals are sort of resembling separate flowers.

ZM

Amazing to see this - thank you for sharing it and the explanation. That makes a lot of sense - they do look like small trumpet flowers - very unique and lovely! I'll definitely click over to the other thread and continue my adventure of learning. Thanks for everything!

Hello again, BunnysGarden,

I have had a lot of variations on that new zinnia flower form, where individual petals look somewhat like flowers.

Breeding zinnias can be a lot of fun. Zinnias can be full of surprises.

(Incidentally, I noticed that you read and gave me a ThumbsUp on the first message in that message string. Over the years that has become a long string of messages. Of course, you are welcome to respond and participate there as well.)

ZM