Return to your roots: heirloom and passalong plants forge a botanical bond with friends past and present.(GARDENING)

Catherine Longest has a name for every plant in her sprawling garden.

There's Indian hyacinth and porcelain vine, Japanese climbing fern and oakleaf hydrangea.

And then there are the plants with names you certainly won't find at garden centers--names like Bobbie Horton, Betty Guest, Linda Bryant, and Eleanor Robbins.

"The fairy roses I rooted from Billie Trott, and Floyce Shaw gave me this wild azalea," Longest says on an afternoon tour of her 26-acre property northwest of Oxford.

With its roots buried deep in the heritage of north Mississippi, this garden bears connections to family, friends, and neighbors--some of whom Longest still sees often and others whose leafy legacy has long outlived them.

Catherine and her husband, Bill, who is now retired from the University of Mississippi biology department, bought their home in the College Hill community in 1968. Back then, what is now their one-acre rose garden was nothing but a corn patch.

"We came here new, and people just shared what they had," she says. "Everybody around here would give you something."

It's a philosophy of gardening that's more common on rural homesteads than in most modern suburbs, and it harks back to an era when people had more time for the garden--and, maybe, more patience.

But the notion of growing antique or "heirloom" varieties remains attractive to…