Zinnia

Scientific

Zinnia (family Asteraceae) contains ~22 species native to the Americas — Mexico is the principal center of diversity. Principal cultivated species:

• Zinnia elegans — common garden zinnia; the source of most modern hybrid cultivars
• Zinnia haageana — Mexican zinnia; smaller, brighter
• Zinnia angustifolia — narrow-leaf zinnia; smaller-flowered cultivars

The flower is a composite (typical of Asteraceae) — the “petals” are ray flowers around a central disc of tightly-packed disc flowers. Cultivar diversity is enormous, with single, double, and dahlia-form blossoms in essentially every saturated color except true blue.

The species’ name honors 18th-century German botanist Johann Gottfried Zinn, who studied Mexican flora at Göttingen.

Cultural and historical

Pre-Columbian Mexica peoples cultivated zinnias — they appear in 16th-century Aztec records under the name mal de ojos (“eye flower,” referring to the central disc). Spanish colonization carried the species to Europe in the 1700s, where it became a staple of cottage-garden plantings.

The American pre-WWII cottage garden — particularly across the Midwest and the South — relied heavily on zinnias. The plants are extraordinarily easy from seed, drought-tolerant, prolific bloomers from June through frost, and attractive to butterflies and bees. The mid-20th-century shift toward labor-intensive cool-season annuals (impatiens, begonias, petunias) somewhat displaced zinnias from default-garden status; the 2000s–2020s pollinator-garden movement has restored them.

The Indiana state flower is the zinnia. The species was also the first flower successfully grown in space — on the International Space Station’s Veggie experiment in 2016, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly nurtured a zinnia from seed to bloom in microgravity, in what became a widely-shared moment of botanical science.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Shares approach with: [[dahlia]] · [[vanilla]] · [[monstera]] · [[mamey-sapote]] · [[cosmos]] · [[avocado]]
• Member of: [[plants]]

Sources

• Wikipedia — Zinnia

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A plant entry in the 0mn1.one [[directory]].