This week, Ann-Christine from Leya is hosting Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #221 and she asked us to show our favorite flowers and tell the story behind it.

I don’t know about everyone else but I have a different favorite flower each year. For 2022, it’s the Zinnia. I first saw the beauty of this flower in a YouTube video in late spring of 2021. This lady was giving a tour of her garden and suddenly, she stopped in front of these flowers, which were as tall as she was. She called them profusion zinnias.

After taking a series of 4 gardening classes at my alma mater last summer, I knew I must plant more flowers in my garden for 2022. And not just any flowers, pollinators attracting flowers. I didn’t know before I took the gardening classes but pollinators aren’t attracted to all flowers. They are attracted to some more than others.

I spent much of my winter holiday last year researching about what to plant to attract more pollinators into my garden. I’ve already planted some perennials last fall. The pink mums were my favorite.

In early 2022, before anybody was thinking about starting flower seeds, I made a trip to my local hardware store and began picking out seeds. The selection was pretty limited as it always seems to be. I now find online seed catalogs offer a much wider variety. I couldn’t find the profusion zinnia and ended up settling for the California State Fair zinnia and the Lilliput zinnia – a tall variety and a dwarf variety for the garden.

Beside zinnias, I also planted forget-me-nots, marigolds, sunflowers, salvias, Asiatic lilies, petunias, and cornflowers in my 2022 garden. They seem to be bringing in the pollinators as I often hear buzzing while working in the garden and often had to swipe away the bees that were flying too close to my face.

Out of the all the flowers in my garden, the zinnia is still my favorite because I like how it looks like it’s wearing a halo when a blossom is passed its prime and I like that the flower lasts quite a while.