By 1988, Gus was gone but some of our wide crosses had done well enough that I decided to test our best seedlings of this type.  In the group:  the one that would become Whirlwind Romance, one of its sibs, and some more distant relatives. Several proved limitedly fertile, but Whirlwind Romance was surprisingly so. Lil quipped that every seed it produced was Gus saying "I told you so". 

For the 1989 season, I turned my attention to other lines.  It would take another year for the first offspring of Whirlwind Romance to bloom. 

1990 brought the maiden bloom of the eldest group of Whirlwind Romance offspring.  Lots of them -- and such a high percentage of good ones that it was hard to decide what to discard.  Guess that's obvious by the number of crosses I made in 1990 and 1991.  So what happened in 1992?

I introduced Whirlwind Romance in 1991 and, in spite of being the most expensive item in the catalog, it not only oversold but generated more requests for pollen than I could fulfill.  Foolishly, I saved none for my own crosses that year

By 1993, I was testing it further and crossing it with many different types to test compatibility. Yes, there are more crosses involving Whirlwind Romance. If no seedlings survived, the cross isn't on the list.  If I banked the seeds or gave them away, it's not on the list.