Handsome border annual plants, requiring the same cultivation as the Marigold.

Zinnia elegans, with its varieties, are all handsome flowering plants; in bloom from July to October; two or three feet high. The colors of some of the varieties are very brilliant, and particularly the scarlets. The colors are white, pale to dark yellow, orange to scarlet; shades from rose to crimson, from crimson to light purple, lilac, etc. The flowers are handsome when it first commences the process of blooming; the central, or disk part of it, which contains the florets, as they begin to form seed, assume a conic shape, and a brown, husky appear ance, which gives the flower a coarse, unsightly look.