Garden

Mom-and-pop operations are especially charming

They're in business because they love old-fashioned flowers or easy-to-grow annuals or water-wise plants, not because they expect to become wealthy selling roots and seeds. Their particular passions are described in such pretty prose that photos are unnecessary.

Here are some additional titles to add to last week's review of mail-order garden wish books.

Dallas Water Utilities has been encouraging us to plant xeriscape (please, do not say "zeroscape") gardens for several years.

Drought or not, water should be conserved as a matter of daily habit. We can look to fellow gardeners in the Western states, especially New Mexico and Arizona, where water-wise landscaping is more developed.

High Country Gardens in Santa Fe not only specializes in perennials that can take hot, dry climates, it breeds and selects improved versions of native species and hybrids. These plants are company trademarks available only through its catalog or at its retail nursery. Since there are only so many quart pots you can stuff into a Southwest Airlines overhead bin, I suggest the catalog for acquiring its treasures.

This company has no intention of turning your garden into a sere, monochromatic desertscape. There's plenty of color to choose from among its specialties: lavender, agastaches, penstemons and salvias.

The catalog is thoughtfully organized into sensible categories according to when featured shrubs, grasses, ground covers and perennials bloom. 1-800-925-9387, www.highcountrygar dens.com

I'm besotted by foxgloves. It's probably too late to be planting starter plants, but Perennial Pleasures Nursery offers 10 kinds, and I want them all – the chocolate brown, the greenish-yellow first documented in American gardens in 1806, the new 'Pam's Choice' (white and crimson) that's supposed to do well here. Perennial Pleasures is in Vermont, where foxgloves flourish in the cool summers, so you have to carefully evaluate its offerings before you commit.

The catalog features old-fashioned plants and, with a nod to its New England location, helpfully provides page-long plant lists suitable for re-creations from 1600 to 1899.

For some, those lists are useful as garden history and as a reference for creating a cottage garden.

The 25-year-old nursery holds a phlox fest each August, so you have to figure they know their phloxes. Tall garden phlox fell out of favor the last few decades because of the species' problems with unsightly powdery mildew.

Each year there's a new cultivar or two that's supposed to be mildew-resistant. But that means we are rarely offered the older hybrids that are so fragrant and bloom in a wide range of colors.

Perennial Pleasures has 41 field-grown phlox listed, including modern hybrids and something the owners discovered driving the back roads: 'Old Cellarhole', a lavender-pink flower head on stems approaching 5 feet tall. 802-472-5104, www .perennialpleasures.net

Niche Gardens near Chapel Hill, N.C., is in USDA horticultural zone 7b.

The retailer specializes in nursery-propagated wildflowers and natives, perennials and ornamental grasses. It has an interesting inventory of woodland plants, including nursery-propagated trilliums and Arisaema (jack-in-the-pulpit), that could be useful in the older neighborhoods' shady lots. 919-967-0078, www.niche gardens.com

Some garden plants are so easy to grow from seed that even I, a practitioner of instant gratification, sow them. Seeds are an inexpensive way to grow a bevy of easygoing summer bloomers. And sometimes it's the only way you'll have certain old-fashioned plants in your garden, because they are not trendy and, therefore, corporate growers do not offer them.

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds in Missouri specializes in vegetable seeds from artichokes to watermelons, many of them uncommon heirlooms. Some are multitaskers, having ornamental value, too. And that's this catalog's appeal to a flower gardener.

Amaranth varieties are offered for their nutritious greens and grains, but I want their long braids of red and green or the massive, upright heads of orange, garnet red or dusty pink. Ditto hyacinth bean vines with their red, purple or white flowers and European mesclun mixes whose leaves are red, purple, yellow and green.

The back of the catalog has a small but useful flower seed listing. Standouts are the cockscomb that produce huge, velvety heads; a mix of red-, pink-, green- and burgundy-leaved castor beans, grown for their oversized, showy foliage; and loads of sweet peas to think about planting next winter. 417-924-8917, www.rareseeds .com