I save them and am horrible about labeling, but I think they can all revert to one color after a while. I know someone on here has mentioned they had to plant new zinnias because they have gone from multiple colors to all one color. From what I've gathered about seed propagation, each seed is different and can produce a plant with different characteristics. So it's possible to get some undesirable crosses, but doubtful they'll all be undesirable.

And while some color may indeed end up being dominant, a lot of that is in the hands of the person collecting the seed. Don't just collect from one plant/head unless that's the only color you want. Spread the love.

I have grown zinnias and saved seed from them for quite a few years and I've never found that I get flowers of all the same color. I have found some very interesting and quite delightful color combinations, though, and seems like the doubles only come back as singles. So I think I will add a fresh packet every year. I do love zinnia for their bright colors and they are drought resistant. Bees, hummingbirds and butterflies all love them but I fail to see where they get any nectar as these seem to be a rather dry type of flower. Some years I've thought something was eating a lot of the seed. The only thing that makes zinna less than perfect is that they have no scent. At least as far as I can discern. I've never really seen a zinnia that was "undesirable".

So my thoughts that if I save seed off of a wide variety of the plants with different colors, appearances, etc., then I can still maintain a fairly diverse flower mix when reseeding in following years, generally, is mostly correct.

Dbarron, I’ll have a look at that thread. I skimmed through it a bit this morning, and it looks quite informative. Thanks for the link.

Ilene, I do like zinnias. I will say, though, that I generally like flowers with a brighter appearance, such as white, pink, or yellow blooms. What is generally considered a “summer color” isn’t my favorite. I’m not sure why. I think in summer afternoons, the sun is just so strong that many places are already lit up red, orange, and yellow, etc. A white, pink, or even a purple and blue color is a refreshment on a hot summer afternoon. I’m very picky about things like that. I just love daisies, cosmos, holly hocks, etc.

Another favorite of mine is some kind of blue wildflower that grows on the edge of the forest in our backyard. I have no idea what they are, but they’re tall and have a very soft, fuzzy leaf. That blue color looks beautiful on the shaded forest floor.

Jacob, I'm sure I can tell you what it is, if I had a good picture.

I would be inclined to say Hepatica, till you said they were tall.

It appears I don't have a picture of that particular flower. I will be sure to get one when it comes up this next spring and post it, though. However, I do have a picture of another pretty patch of purple flowers that always blooms on the side of the hill (eastern facing slope) down by the creek, just about every spring. Any idea what these are? This is the closest picture I can find. It is probably hard to tell.

Could be a phlox, but yes, need closer up photos. There aren't many BLUE wildflowers native to Arkansas, so I'd be interested and fairly sure I can id it.

With zinnias, I have let mine reseed for 10-15 years and haven't lost all the colors, but have ended up mostly with pinks and yellows after all that time. These all have been O-P varieties, and sometimes you end up with some odd petals or odd flowerheads, but I don't mind it. If you are growing hybrid zinnias, I have found that some of them just do not reseed well, while others do. As long as you aren't expecting to get reseeding volunteers that are exactly the same as the original F-1 plants, you likely will be pleased with the results. The dahlia type flowers also seem to reseed more heavily and more readily than the cactus flower types. I stopped gathering zinnia seeds long, long ago and just let them reseed where they may. When I get too many volunteers in one spot, I just dig up the excess plants and move them elsewhere.

Zinnia seed can be expensive if you want the latest, greatest hybrid types, but mixes of the old O-P types are cheap and there's usually a lot of seeds in a packet. Zinnias are, and always have been, my favorite flower, dating back to my childhood.

Last year I grew a ton of hybrids, especially some of the different colors of Profusion Zinnia, Zahara and Magellan. They were gorgeous and took over the edges of the garden. This year, I plan to grow something entirely different from seed, but I'll let the zinnia volunteers stay to the extent that I can. Butterflies adore them,so I always like to have lots of zinnias around.

Dawn, was about to ask what you are doing over here...but then I see cross-posted :) Happy Holidays.

Hey, Happy Holidays to you as well! I hope you and yours have a wonderful and blessed time together.

I love the holidays, but I do admit that once they are here, my mind is racing ahead to starting seeds indoors (yes, of course it is too early, but my mind still goes there anyway....) and planting onions (for me, at this latitude, that occurs in mid-February). I was just thinking this morning that maybe tomorrow I can squeeze in a couple of hours in the garden tomorrow before the rain arrives. Tim is off on Christmas, but works Christmas Eve (law enforcement officers don't really get much time off on or around holidays) so spending some time in the garden on Christmas Eve is not out of the realm of possibility.

This conversation about seeds in general and zinnias in particular takes me back to the fall of 1997 when we purchased this property. Even though we had a lot of land to clear and to fence before we even could think about having the house built, one of the first things I did after we chose the site for the house was to build two raised beds in what someday would be our back yard. Then we put a barbed wire fence around the raised beds to at least keep out the larger wild animals. In the spring of 1998 I planted tomato plants, pepper plants, hollyhocks, marigolds and zinnias in those raised beds. Keep in mind, we hadn't even put in a water line (or a driveway) yet, so I had to haul water from Fort Worth in big cat litter jugs every weekend to water my tiny raised bed garden. It was sort of ridiculous but I was so eager to have a garden here, so there it was, looking pretty and producing well when the builder broke ground to start building the house in August of 1998. By August, of course, we had put in a long gravel driveway with the water line running alongside it.

In 1999 we moved here and I sowed zinnia seeds for a butterfly garden just outside the kitchen window---in an area now too shady for zinnias. I miss having those zinnias where I could see them, and the butterflies, outside the kitchen window and want to have them back there again. I'd only have to convince Tim to cut down three trees to make my backyard zinnia garden a reality again. Those trees may provide shade, but I NEED flowers. This is all Jacob's fault---making me long for more zinnias. (Just kidding, Jacob, but thinking about your desire to save seeds made me remember how avidly I saved and replanted seeds throughout our first decade here, which makes me miss my kitchen window butterfly garden.) Imagine what a dazzling array of zinnias I could look at when I'm working in the kitchen if we'd never planted those trees and if my zinnia plants, and their descendants, from 1999 and onward had been allowed to resow for all these years. Now I'm hatching a plan to reclaim that shady space as a sunny butterfly garden.

I cannot even go to the Annuals Forum and read zen-man's latest post on breeding your own zinnias because I just get lost in dreams of dropping all the veggies and having nothing in the garden but flowers (which I'd never do, but it is a nice dream). I have read a lot of the older threads on zinnias there, but not very recently.

There are other plants that reseed happily with wild abandon here (any kind of celosia or amaranth, many salvias, all morning glories (to the point that I start hating them for their invasiveness), daturas, sunflowers, four o'clocks, poppies, larkspur and black-eyed susan vines to name a few, but none of them make my heart sing the way that zinnias do. Partly it is their heat tolerance too. Not many flowering plants can tolerate weeks of temperatures in the 90s and 100s with little to no rainfall and only very minimal irrigation the way zinnias do, and then manage to survive getting a foot of rainfall in clay soil in one month when the drought breaks. When you find a type of flowering annual that survives your region's craziest weather, you have to embrace it and let it run wild and free in your garden, which explains why almost every raised bed in my veggie garden this year had zinnias in it somewhere, happily mingling with the herbs and veggies and keeping the bees and butterflies happy.

Yeah, I rouge morning glories that come to me from elsewhere (because they're scary invasive), four o'clocks are forever. But I can't grow a poppy or larkspur to save my life (too wet).

I have some hageana zinnias that I meant to sow last year, but got lost in doing other things and didn't happen. Hopefully this year. My pot jungle last year was scary...I hope to have it not be so overwhelming this year.

Dawn, hauling water all the way from Fort Worth in cat litter jugs!! I guess you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to get the job done, haha. Seriously though, that’s a determined gardener.

Having a flower garden outside the kitchen window WOULD be nice. I would love to do that myself, but being on a steeper hill our kitchen is raised up 10-15 feet off the ground, so that wouldn’t work quite as well.

We have flower beds outside our front door where we dug our an area for our raised beds and flower beds. My gardens are terraced, the big main piece (where my front garden lies) being on top of it all. Just below what I call the front garden is a 5 ft. drop off to a big flower bed area and 3 raised beds, 1 along the front of the house for flowers, the other 2 for vegetables. This area is where our door to the house is, tucked behind the beds. Then out back I am working on building a few raised beds where we took out a tree, and I also have a terraced back garden.

I’m attempting to get the soil in better shape, as having dug down so much it was very poor. After cover cropping with radish and peas and some lasagna gardening last year, and then letting the worms work it, I’ve now got a good 8” of soil depth. I’m hoping to get these beds filled up this next year with self seeding annuals and perennials. There’s also that big bed in front of our house with great soil. It gets full afternoon sunlight but full morning shade. I’ve considered growing holly hocks there, but may run into rust with morning shade. Zinnias would be wonderful there, but powdery mildew with that morning shade....I may take cuttings off of our lilac bushes and fill up that space. I just love lilac bushes. Last year we enjoyed no blooms because our lilacs bloomed in the fall with spring-like weather and then got killed off by winter. This year they have buds with the mild December (yet again), but no blooms. I do hope they learned their lesson.

I also have a new area behind our back deck, where our current lilac bush is, that I plan to turn over and plant some flowers. Just needs a little more color! That area gets a lot of sunlight, so I also plan to put a hill or two of winter squash back there. Those crops are banned from the garden, because they just can’t keep to themselves.