A great choice for all purple lovers out there!
My oldest daughter is unabashed in her love of the color purple. She enjoys looking at all of the purple plants in the seed catalog (root veggies included) and was adamant that we purchase some “purple flower seeds.” We knew that we were going to grow lots of annuals from seed during the summer of 2020, as our garden needed more color and my wife wanted a regular supply of flowers to cut and arrange. We decided to try several heirloom flower varieties, and agreed on a number of zinnia varieties. This particular variety quickly became a family favorite!
We started a bunch of our zinnias inside in seedling trays, to get earlier color in the garden, but also sowed some directly outside once the weather warmed. ‘Purple Prince’ performed the best in the seedling trays, producing healthy plants and exhibiting the highest germination rate. This was our second year starting seeds indoors, and we learned a few lessons following our first attempt in the prior year. We live right on the northern edge of the USDA Zone 6a in east-central Indiana, with a typical last frost date sometime in late April or early May. I tried a new seed starting set-up in 2020, and had a bit more room to start more seedlings inside, so we started quite a few zinnia plants in about mid-March. We were able to transplant them outdoors late into the second week in May, as we had a later-than-usual frost that month. Fortunately the seedlings had not fully outgrown the seed trays and quickly took hold in the garden and other flower beds around the house.
The plants seemed to produce a mixture of semi-double and double flower heads, the latter being our favorite. We fell in love with the bright lime green color on the underside of the petals, which beautifully contrasted with the deep purple of the bloom. Some of the largest zinnia flower heads we harvested were from this variety. Although the double-flowered heads were our favorite, the single-flowered blooms are also very attractive on this variety as the yellow center is the perfect complement to the deep purple of the bloom itself. Both were lovely additions to our many arrangements, as we had lots of yellow flowers to cut and the purple provided a nice balance.
We fell in love with the bright lime green color on the underside of the petals, which beautifully contrasted with the deep purple of the bloom.
The variety ultimately produced very tall and vigorous plants, many over 36″ in height. Of all the varieties we grew, they had the longest stems which made them much easier to cut and arrange. Once the blooms were cut, most plants split into more branches at the point of “pruning“. While this came as no surprise, as the summer progressed and I began to cut more and more blooms, I started to wish I had strategically snipped the plants earlier on — therefore creating more opportunities for the plant to produce flowers. Honestly, we were a bit overwhelmed with the number and variety of annuals being grown in the garden (many more than we had ever grown before), that pruning was not top of mind. Lesson learned, and I will be testing this technique in future summer growing seasons!
Growing up in and around a commercial greenhouse, I had been accustomed to more hybrid varieties of zinnias, and was worried that we would be battling powdery mildew all summer long. Although we did have some at the end of the summer, for the most part this was not an issue for us. Of all the varieties we grew, ‘Purple Prince’ seemed to fair the best with the powdery mildew, and the plants that we started inside were certainly the most healthy and struggled the least with disease. We did not do much in the way of disease prevention, and it the overall lack of powdery mildew may have been more luck than anything else! What I have learned about zinnias is that they love the heat, and those with the most direct sun exposure not only performed the best, but had the least disease struggles. We will likely try even more varieties of zinnias in the future, but will certainly keep growing this beautiful variety — a decision that has thrilled our purple-loving little girl!
// Dad Gardener
