How I Bred My Own Strain of Zinnias (And How You Can As Well)

If you’ve been around long enough, you know my spiel on lighter, muted colored flowers. Although the bright and punchy colors are great for a garden and being seen from a long distance away, the muted colors are the ones that I prefer using for floral designing, especially for wedding work.

It is also widely apparent that the majority of plants and flowers are grown for the first application - where they are being viewed from a long distance away and are colored intensively as a result, with few breeders selecting for the softer colors that work well for being viewed up close in a floral arrangement.

Zinnias in particular have a bad reputation of being gaudy and boldly colored. Great for a fun pop of color in the garden, but if you put too many of them in an arrangement it’s a bit too overstimulating if not balanced out with other colors.

Recent efforts at breeding have resulted in more subtle colorations for zinnias including the ‘Queen’ series by Benary (you can read more about the Queen series here) that introduced more subtle and muted colored zinnias that were a huge boon to floral designers and flower farmers everywhere.

But it hasn’t been until recently that there have been larger attempts at breeding zinnias that match the lovely pastel color palette that flower farmers are constantly searching for. It’s been found in dahlia breeding including Cafe au Lait and Sweet Nathalie and KA’s Mocha Jo (among the dozens of other varieties) and has been found in certain lisianthus varieties (including the Voyage series that comes in light pink, apricot and champagne colors) and even in gomphrena (QIS raspberry and lilac) and celosia (Texas Plume Mix, Celway Terracotta, Sylphid and of course the multiple varieties bred by Erin at Floret).

But zinnias have been lacking for the most part and has not been commercially available. The first and most notable for me was Erin Benzakein of Floret Flower Farm who introduced her ‘Golden Hour’ and ‘Little Flower Girl’ varieties a few years ago (and I woefully did not buy any of those seeds at the time).

Erin Benzakein of Floret Flower Farm with her ‘Golden Hour’ zinnia mix

More recently, I’ve been made aware of the work of Kori at Dawn Creek Farm has been teasing out all sorts of gorgeous colors from zinnias for years and years, and who has also partnered with Erin of Floret to continue to breed and distribute her zinnias on a wider scale.

Kori from Dawn Creek Farm’s Zinnia Mix

There’s also Tiffany of Blomma Flower Farm who has similarly been breeding her own strain of zinnias, but also has been delving more into the breeding and cultivation of zinnias as well, including writing a book on it.

Tiffany of Blomma Flower Farm’s ‘Muted Pastels’ mix

You can understand the draw of these zinnias based on their coloration and form. Indeed, many of these zinnias would rival even the most expensive and sought-after rose or lisianthus or dahlia.

More importantly, zinnias are quite easily cultivated and grown compared to other similar focal flowers, and would be quite a boon for flower farmers and designers.

I haven’t been able to get my hands on the seeds of any of these breeders, so I decided to try and breed my own pastel colored zinnias.

I ended up selecting for a few qualities

  • Pastel or muted colors

  • Rounded petals (non laciniated)

  • Small flower size (I wanted to have more pastel colored supporting flowers of a small to mid-sized bloom)

  • Prolific blooming nature (naturally branching if possible)

  • Vigor and good health

To start off, I’ve always appreciated the ‘Oklahoma’ series of zinnias for their flower size and general vigor and health. We’ve grown the salmon, white and ivory series for their color, and have found them to be extremely useful and beautiful.

I also loved the ‘Zinderella’ series for their color and scale. The tiny zinnias were the most useful for us because they play nicely with other flowers in an arrangement, and the color of ‘Peach’ and ‘Lilac’ varieties were particularly beautiful.

There was also the vigor of the ‘Cresto’ series of zinnias that I liked - as well as the mix of ‘Peaches and Cream’ that had flowers ranging from light pink to blush to lilac to peach.

I’ve grown a lot of them over the years, and some of them have re-seeded around, but I had never thought of just growing them out before to see what came up.

So if we’re looking at the cross, it would be:

Oklahoma ‘Ivory’, ‘Salmon’ x Zinderella ‘Peach’, ‘Lilac’ x Cresto! ‘Peaches and Cream’ x ‘Lilliput’ x ‘Benary Giant Mix’ (the last two included because we had a large patch of it growing that we had been using for mixed bouquets and was technically a source of genetic material for the mix at some point)

And this is the end result:

Individuals of the ‘Kokoro Garden Mix’

It’s not quite finished - it has quite a few more singles than I would like, and the colors aren’t 100% stable as of yet (I’d like to have more golden tones included as well for warmer palettes) but it’s proven for the past two seasons to produce lovely small-scale blooms in ivory, cream, linen, blush, pale lavender, pale peach, apricot, cantaloupe and light gold.

These blooms have now filled many an arrangement and bouquet and bedecked tables and arches and installations, which brings me a lot of joy to know. And they have also fulfilled a major niche of providing those lovely creamy muted colors that are in high demand for us, which makes them extremely useful.

What I’ve been mostly surprised with is the idea that you could develop a flower specifically for the needs of your growing operations. Obviously it’s quite an endeavor and requires years of selection and restraint (including not growing other varieties of zinnias for fear of cross pollination) but in the end it is quite worth it.

It’s also interesting to be able to see how the mix develops. For example I intentionally selected for the warmer gold and melon tones in the mix to be able to have a better mix of those colors.

In the future, I’m hoping to select for more double-flowering shapes to increase the frequency within the mix (although I do love the singles as well) as well as potentially seeing what else shows up in the mix as well.

And although the mix is relatively set (Small sized multi-branching in pastel colors with single and double forms) technically the mix is an ever evolving, changing concept. Maybe I will refine and narrow it down into individual colors? Or perhaps I’ll go a completely different direction - the possibilities are endless.

How to create a breeding setup

There are a lot of details on zinnia breeding setups out there on the internet. Back in the day, there were people who were pollinating their zinnias by hand, using paintbrushes to dust the pistils, but more to see what was possible with the zinnia genetics and for personal fun and pleasure (and nothing wrong with that at all if you are continuing forward as a hobbyist).

If you’re trying to reach a certain volume however, that may not work due to a sheer lack of time and ability to hand pollinate even a smaller patch of zinnias.

This is where other breeders have taken to building “flysolations” - tunnels covered in lightweight netting under which they utilize blue bottle flies as pollinators (and they are quite effective pollinators according to their results). This works quite well in terms of being able to produce a large amount of seed from a small number of plants, but it does require you to have additional infrastructure, requires you to buy in fly pupae on I believe what is bi-weekly intervals, and isn’t quite the most esthetic setup and requires more work and care.

Then there is my approach: simply plant the ‘mother’ varieties you want to start off with and let the already existing pollinators work their magic as a open-pollinated setup. It requires an increased number of plants in order to ensure that you have genetic material you’re looking for, and it also requires you to not grow any zinnias that you don’t want getting added to your genetic pool - but it has enabled me to get to my destined goal of small pastel-colored zinnias.

I have to admit, my approach is likely the laziest and is the least refined, but it has worked well for what I was aiming for. It took a while to weed out the less desirable traits - bold colors from the Oklahoma and Cresto and Lilliput series, the irregular petal distribution of the Zinderellas, and the scabiosa flowering form of the Cresto and Zinderella series (I’ve never found it to be especially desirable in our hot and dry environment and they often look more diseased than attractive) and have for the most part succeeded.

Collecting the seeD

After you have grown out your zinnias, the next part is collecting the seed.

If you’re in a relatively dry environment like ours (with plenty of heat) then your zinnias will likely produce a lot of seed very easily and readily, ripening naturally on the flower for you to collect at some point in the future (we usually collect seed after the last frost when the plant is entirely dead, snapping the heads off).

If you’re in a more humid environment - especially one that is cooler - you may have a harder time with the seeds ripening naturally on the flower due to the amount of rain and precipitation that may cause them to go moldy or even sprout on the plant. Instead of waiting for the seeds to ripen on the plant, you may want to pre-harvest the heads instead and then collect the seed from them once they have fully dried out (you can achieve this in your home or a special setup for drying in a studio or barn or shed).

Once you have your heads, you’ll want to remove the seeds from the flower heads. You can either run your fingers around the outside of the head and loosen the seeds individually, or you can do what the team at Floret does - crush them completely and then separate the chaff from the seed (they lay them out on tarps and stomp on them to break up the flower heads, and then place the entire mass into a seed separator/processor that blows a steady stream of air to send the chaff fluttering away while the heavier seed drops down into a catchment container).

I do this on a small scale by placing the seeds in a large bowl and then gently blowing a stream of air from my lips to dust off the chaff from the heavier seeds. It isn’t perfect, but it seems to work well enough to provide enough seed from each head. I’ll even save the chaff and plant it out, but I haven’t found it to be especially important to do so.

Once you’ve finished collecting your seed and cleaning it out, ensure that you store it in an airtight container that is kept in a cool and dry location. You can even store it in the freezer for extra longevity - reassurance that you have seed stored away for the future.

And if trying to breed zinnias isn’t your thing

But you would also like to grow pastel-colored zinnias in lovely, muted, gorgeous colors that are incredibly productive and excellent cut flowers, we have a limited opportunity for you to purchase some zinnia seeds!

We have launched a zinnia breeding crowdfunding project to help us be able to continue our work on growing and breeding zinnias and select new and interesting varieties for flower farmers and cut flower growers and home gardeners everywhere.

Basically in return for pledging some money towards the program (allowing us to dedicate our growing space and efforts into growing out and breeding these special zinnias) we are releasing a limited number of seed packets out into the world as a thank-you for funding our efforts.

If you’re interested in growing some of the ‘Kokoro Garden Mix’ zinnias this year, you can check out the link to the fundraiser below:

2024 Tier 3 Breeding Program Pledge
2024 Tier 3 Breeding Program Pledge
$50.00
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