From A History of Zinnias: Flower for the Ages by Eric Grissell:
“Zinnias fall into a class of plants that are generally self-infertile. This simply means that a single zinnia flower will not pollinate itself and requires pollen to be carried from another flower to induce fertilization and seed production. But with purebred parents, random crossing cannot be allowed or there will be a complex recombination of genes and loss of identify for each strain, a mongrel if you will. In commercial production, different purebred strains or series must be kept separate from each other if each is to remain stable and produce seed. This means that plants must either be hand-pollinated in isolation, an expensive option, or that each strain must somehow be isolated from other strains and be openly pollinated by natural elements such as bees….
“This method of seed production is achieved by growing each selection in fields distant enough from other such strains to prevent bees or butterflies from carrying pollen from one field to another. If color is not important but retaining the characteristics of the strain is, then colors can be mixed in a single field, which may be separated from a different strain by as much as five hundred feet of bare soil or interplanted with other flower species to prevent cross-strain interbreeding. If color is important, then within each strain each color must be planted in separate patches isolated from one another. This all requires acres of land or different locations to keep strains and colors pure and to ensure that pollinators do not travel between patches….
“Although zinnia flowers are a dazzling sight in themselves, one of their major advantages is a penchant for attracting other equally beautiful life forms to the garden…. With the exception of seed-feeding birds, most visitors do no cosmetic harm to zinnia leaves or flowers, as they merely feed on the nectar and pollen sources….
“Bees, whether solitary or social, visit only to collect nectar or pollen for their young…. In spite of the fact that there are hundreds of kinds of zinnias in all shape, sizes, and colors… there is no one answer as to which zinnia is the best for attracting butterflies, bees, or birds. The number of species and the diversity of wildlife attracted depends on where the gardener lives, which regulates what is available to visit a garden….”
From “Transition” in Collected Poems (1930-1973) by May Sarton:
The zinnias, ocher, orange, chrome and amber,
Fade in their cornucopia of gold,
As all the summer turns toward September
And light in torrents flows through the room.
A wasp, determined, zigzags high then low,
Hunting the bowl of rich unripened fruit,
Those purple plums clouded in powder blue,
Those pears, green-yellow with a rose highlight.
The zinnias stand so stiff they might be metal.
The wasp has come to rest on a green pear,
And as fierce light attacks the fruit and petal,
We sigh and feel the thunder in the air.
We are suspended between fruit and flower;
The dying, the unripe possess our day.
By what release of will, what saving power
To taste the fruit, to throw the flowers away?
Hello!
This is the first of three posts with photographs of Zinnias from Oakland Cemetery that I took in August and in October — a timeframe that demonstrates the long blooming cycle for these members of the Aster family, whose wide variety of different colors is well-known among floral connoisseurs and well-described in the poem I excerpted at the top of this post.
As far as I know, Oakland has but one collection of zinnias, which start to appear in late summer in a location I previously photographed during the spring (see Land of Azaleas and Roses)…
… and proceed to gradually replace the roses, irises, and greens you see in this photo with their tall, densely-leafed stems. By September and October, Zinnias will have filled out the section at the top of the wall and popped through the sandy hillside next to it, leading to displays like this (taken from atop the wall at the same location), where you can still see some of the rosebush branches they’ve crowded out:
Whenever I’ve photographed these Zinnias, the entire scene is very busy with pollinators, typically small moths, butterflies, and a variety of bees. Just watching their movements, without even taking pictures, becomes a nature study in itself — an experience similar to visiting a butterfly sanctuary and one that is unrivaled elsewhere in the gardens. A couple of years ago, I focused one of my posts on the striking orange and black fritillaries traveling from flower to flower (see Zinnias and Fritillaries from 2023); and this year, I was able to capture several other pollinators. The first group of photos below shows a honeybee, a small orange-brown butterfly that is most likely a Fiery Skipper common to the southeast, and a Black Swallowtail noted for its dark colors with iridescent blue shading.
The flowers in this first post show one of several distinctive Zinnia forms, a single-flowered zinnia — where “single flower” refers to the flat row of petals surrounding the pear-shaped seed structure at the center that’s topped with tiny composite flowers (often yellow or orange ones that look like flowers growing out of other flowers), which attract pollinators and lead them to both the nectar- and pollen-producing segments of the plants. In the second post, we’ll see more of this single-flowered form but in different shapes and colors; and in the last post, we’ll look at double-flowered zinnias featuring multiple petal rows that are typically shaped liked and about the same size as a golf ball, but a pretty one.
The circular flower petal row in the single-flowered Zinnia makes a convenient landing pad for our pollinators, providing one of the reasons Zinnias attract so many different kinds simultaneously. They help the flowers transmit pollen and seed the ground with future generations, something that leads to propagation of next year’s crop even if the original plants are annuals rather than perennials. The quotation I included at the top of this post covers these concepts in some detail, illustrating how the plants provide biological diversity through their attraction to multiple pollinators, which also explains why this crop of Zinnias expands every year even if the garden’s landscapers don’t plant new ones at the start of each season. Unlike their counterparts that are bred in separate fields to maintain genetic distinction and isolate specific colors and forms for distribution and sale, however, these Oakland Zinnias are more likely to cross-breed and share genetic characteristics — thereby blooming in a variety of different colors and blended forms that give them a more random appearance, like a vibrant patch of wildflowers growing on the side of a road.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
