my own experiments.. brought me the moist joy.. and the most education..

congrats...

ken

ps: pretty cloudy day.. that might be why your camera didnt capture the color...

The color looks beautiful to me!

Thanks, Ken and socalgal!

Hi party_music,

This could be the start of a hobby for you. You could cross-pollinate various dahlias to create hybrid seeds which could produce some new kinds. I considered dahlias instead of zinnias as a hobby because some "dinner plate" dahlias are larger than the largest zinnias. And zinnias don't have tubers. But seed-to-seed was faster with zinnias, so I went with them.

ZM

Thanks for the encouragement, zen_man, but I'm certain that I don't need *another* hobby. lol!

To be clear, I purchased the seed... I was surprised to learn that dahlia seed was even sold, since I've never seen anything but tubers for sale. Then I read the reviews about them flowering the first year from seed and I wanted to test it for myself. I also liked the idea of getting multiple flower colors from their seed mix, so now I'm anxious to see my other plants bloom. I planted 12 seeds, 5 sprouted within 2 days, and the rest never did sprout. So I'm growing 5 surprise dahlias... some have green foliage and some have burgundy. Hence, it is my fun and successful experiment! :)

Very pretty petal shape and color, ZM.

Glad you like it. These closed-end tube zinnia petals interest me.

ZM

ZM, I definitely prefer the open petals, but your photo is gorgeous.

I’m still waiting for the others to bloom. :)

Hi party_music,

That is a great closeup of your dahlia bloom. It shows the flower parts in great detail, including receptive female stigmas and male pollen-bearing florets. And, as is widely known, we can mouse-click on the photo to open a larger version of the photo, courtesy of the Houzz forum software. The photo in the original starting message of a message string is allowed to be large, but the photos in answering messages are in effect merely "thumbnails" until clicked on to open a larger view of the photo.

There is a "trick" that may not be so widely known. You can see a somewhat larger view of a clicked-on photo by hitting the F11 key on your keyboard. That hides all of the Browser header information to make a bit more space for the photo. After enjoying the larger view of the photo you can hit F11 again to restore your Browser's header info. Your photo is worthy of the larger F11 view.

ZM

If anyone is interested, another of my dahlia plants that was grown from seed has a flower opening… it’s like a golden yellow with random swirls of magenta. Cool color! :)

Hi party_music,

It is interesting that your specimen has an entirely different color from its parent. That suggests that the parent was an F1 hybrid. This zinnia had some similarity in flower shape.

The Dahlia Flowered strain of zinnias presumably resembles dahlias, although they didn't remind me of dahlias. To me, dahlias tend to have very large individual petals.

ZM