Zinnia
Zinnia elegans · Garden flowers
Zinnia, focus-stacked
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 19 August 2026
A zinnia in the August border, built from a stack of frames refocused through the flower and merged afterward, rather than one exposure at a small aperture - the only way to get the near-side ray florets and the disc florets at the centre both fully sharp at this magnification without diffraction softening the whole image.
The centre is a ring of disc florets opening in sequence from the outside in: the ones already open show yellow anthers, while the dark red ones nearer the middle haven't reached that stage yet. What reads as a single ring of "petals" around the edge is the flower's ray florets, each one a complete, if sterile, flower in its own right. A zinnia head is a composite of dozens of flowers, in the same family as daisies and sunflowers, and the garden ones are all bred from a handful of Mexican species.
Zinnia
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 14 August 2025
Most of the zinnias sold as bedding plants trace back to this one Mexican species, bred over two centuries into the dense, ruffled forms far removed from the simple daisy-like wildflower it started as.
The yellow ring at the centre is dozens of individual disc florets, each capable of setting its own seed once pollinated. It was the first flower grown in space, on the space station in 2016.
Zinnia
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 26 July 2025
Hot pink shading to a paler edge on each petal, a ring of yellow disc florets not yet all opened at the centre.
An easy, heat-tolerant Mexican annual that has been a cutting-garden staple in North America for well over a century. The Aztecs thought it ugly and called it eyesore; the Spanish took it to Europe anyway, and a German botanist named Zinn got his name on it.
Zinnia, going over
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 29 May 2025
Past its best - the pink-and-cream ray petals still bright, but the central disc already dried and curling, with a few stray yellow florets left unfurling at odd angles. Not every photograph from a garden has to catch a flower at its peak.
The five-pointed yellow stars at the centre are the disc florets of a zinnia, which is what this most likely is - early for one, but bedding plants go in with the flowers already open.
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