Lynn..
I am assuming your weather conditions are similar to mine in NY and some plants that are incredible on the west coast will not look the same in your garden the weather will affect things differently .. When Superstition and Napa were open to visitors in California I would make the trip to visit them while I was at Joe's it was amazing how different a few hours one way or another would make on how they looked while Oregon and California can both get some storms the majority of the time you can count on there bloom seasons to almost be perfect conditions with very little wind and driving rains like we get in the midwest..so plants that stand up there in those conditions will not behave the same in ours it is one of the reasons I breed for the tight standards and ruffles as the bloom will last twice as long here while the older tailored ones will fall apart in a heavy downpour while there both beautiful I want to extend the season as long as possible so my preference is the Ghio Form.
Another issue that affects branching/buds here is the late frosts that we now get constantly our temps seem to heat up late march early April reaching into the 70s during the day for weeks and this pushes the plants to wake up and grow quickly and then we get hit with a week in the 20's which will stunt them depending on where there at ..It makes it impossible to really know what I have for height as they never get as tall as Oregon here which is OK as I am probably one of the few that prefer things on the smaller side 32-26" is perfect anything 40" and above here will take a beating in a thunderstorm with 50mph gusts and a downpour but in Oregon they look amazing because its pretty rare to get that crazy Midwest weather and it definitely makes me Jealous
what I could get accomplished with that perfect weather
I posted you pictures last night of the Keppel plants zoom in on his stalks and look at the spacing and the form on them this is what Im after we don't want the flowers to open on top of each other and we want the stems strong enough so they won't fall over he is meticulous about it and won't tolerate them even if they lean a little bit and that is why his introductions are the best and I recommend you try to work with his plants as much as possible he has bred for these traits in everything and it will carry over to the next generation it's easy to find pretty flowers in a seedling patch but its very difficult to get the complete package with Buds/ adequate branching/ strong stems/modern form but if you cross the right plants together that have all of those things already your chances of hitting the jackpot improve significantly
