by Betsy Burgeson
If you have walked through the main gate or walked by the Amp lately you may have noticed some silver shimmering baggies covering some of our Zinnias.
The bags aren’t there simply to make passerby wonder; they are part of an experiment the Gardens Team is doing for the first time—trying our hand at being the birds and the bees..aka Pollinators! The covers prevent "accidental" pollination by bees, butterflies etc., which allows us to control which traits (flowers) are crossed through hand pollination.
Most of the State Fair Zinnias that you see throughout the grounds were started in the Gardens shop in March from the seeds we collected from last year’s Zinnias.
Zinnias are open pollinated which means they can cross pollinate with each other, sharing their traits and making new color and trait combinations. When the 2023 State Fair Zinnias started blooming, we noticed a few varieties we hadn’t seen before and wondered whether we could pollinate them ourselves in order to retain those traits thereby “creating” our own State Fair hybrids.
The photograph above by Jane Becker (yes, that Jane Becker!) shows a Zinnia with beautiful fuchsia to orange ombre coloring. We've also identified a cream-colored flower with yellow edges and a double bright coral. Those are three we are trying to self-fertilize to retain those color combinations.
There are also a couple of other varieties that we will be crossing just to see what happens when they are mixed, including a large double orange variety with a yellow single that has trumpet shaped petals!
Needless to say, we are VERY EXCITED to see what comes of our garden-nerd experiment—after all, isn’t half the fun of gardening waiting to see what comes up next year?
Stay tuned and please look closely at next year's Zinnias!
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