I’m the first to admit that I’m not an expert at flora identification by any means, but I’m pretty sure the flowers I saw at a home store a couple of weeks ago were mislabeled. They claimed they were hanging baskets of zinnia, but they were not. I checked the tag to make sure that they weren’t a different kind than I’m familar with, but the pictures on the tag match my mental picture of them, not the contents of the baskets.
Instead of being the roundish ball of petals you expect zinna to be, they were more like tiny daisies on long trailing stalks (but like they’d gotten overgrown from a lack of sunlight rather than vines). Each flower was about the size of a quarter, and they were all bright orange, close to the shade of the african daisies in this picture. I found them charming but not $15 for mystery flowers charming.
What you are describing is the wild-form zinnia. Buy any packet of commercial zinnia seed, collect and re-sow the seed each year, and in 5-10 years you will have that plant. There’s nothing special about them, they’re common both as garden escapees and as volounteers within gardens. The ornamental Zinnia have been selectively bred from that stock.
Precisely what it was, you’re never going to know. Most commercial Zinnia are hybrids of elegans and *violacea * and often other species, but most seem revert back to something indistinguishable from the elegans wild form, which is probably what you saw.
And you’re right, $15 is horribly overpriced for what is essentially a weed.
