A new way to find old seeds

Nothing provides more warmth on a winter day than a cruise through a seed catalog. In those pages rests the promise of sunshine and warmth, both wrapped warmly in memory — the succulence of Grandma's vegetable garden, the colorful riot of Aunt Rose's flowers.

We can help those memories sprout in real life, because old is new in seeds: heritage tomatoes, heirloom vegetables, wild crops. Even old standby W. Atlee Burpee & Co., selling seeds from Pennsylvania for more than a century, now features heirloom asparagus, beans, beets, carrots, corn, sweet peas, marigolds and zinnias.

If you've gardened since childhood, you'll recognize the varieties as new and improved in their day but now old and reliable. That's because "heirloom," though loosely defined, means varieties introduced at least 50 years ago that are open-pollinated, not the result of hybrids whose seeds revert to the varieties from which they were sprung.

Old-world, past-century and ancient varieties have captured chefs' imaginations, as well. Order a salad in a trendy restaurant and you may find purple tomatoes in the salad, heirlooms from the Mediterranean.

Nobody would grow them if they didn't stand up to time. But many seed houses specializing in such plants are small and difficult to find — unless you visit the Web. Here's a selection of them.

• www.care2.com/channels/solutions/outdoors/415; Care2, based in Redwood City, Calif. The online network of people interested in humanitarian causes and healthful living offers a brief rundown of seed types. Heirloom seeds remain strong because of genetic diversity due to open pollination — sort of like being the mutts of the plant world.

• www.seedsavers.org; Seed Savers Exchange, Decorah, Iowa. This membership organization, founded in 1975 when a grandfather passed on old-world seeds to his grandson, saves and shares garden seeds. You'll find more than 35 categories of vegetables and fruits, as well as flowers and herbs. Here we found the wonderberry (originally bred as the sunberry by Luther Burbank, horticulturist extraordinaire of the last century), said to rival blueberries in all ways.

• www.heirloomseeds.com; Heirloom Seeds, West Elizabeth, Pa. The site looks homemade — packed with text in a crazy quilt of fonts — but the company is quite serious about providing organic and nonorganic seeds with stories behind them from North America, Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean and elsewhere.

Look for a United Nations of cucumber varieties, including Russian, Mexican and Japanese. Complete garden packages are available; one offers 123 vegetables, 27 flowers and 21 herbs packaged for use this year or to be stored up to three years. A Western wildflower mix also is offered.

• www.abundantlifeseed.com; Abundant Life Seed Co., Saginaw, Ore. Customers contribute to the seed inventories, which come from open-pollinated types of flowers, vegetables and herbs rather than hybrids. Check out the oldest named variety of sweet corn — no hints about which of the four corn varieties it is.

• www.nativeseeds.org; Native Seeds/SEARCH, Tucson, Ariz. This organization has collected about 2,000 varieties of traditional crops grown by Native Americans of the West, with the "three sisters" of beans, squash and corn accounting for more than half. Some grow best in an arid climate, but others tolerate considerable rainfall. Look for tomatillos, the stuff of green salsa; cotton; amaranth, a grain attractive to birds; onions; and melons.

• www.victoryseeds.com; Victory Seed Co., Molalla, Ore. Open-pollinated, organic and heirloom seeds find homes here — and there are plenty to outfit the garden.

The site includes tips on growing and what germination rate to expect. Each plant description includes a small history of the variety. Tomatoes can be called up by color, such as pink and purple, or orange and white, with about 40 listed in the "pink/purple" category alone. Each description includes a photo, a glaring absence at other Web sites.

• www.vegetableseed.net; Anioleka Seeds Co., Grants Pass, Ore. Using imported source seed, Anioleka says it tries several strains of the same variety before settling on the best. Among the fruits: a 19th-century exhibition-quality watermelon, a melon Thomas Jefferson mentioned growing at Monticello in 1794 and a banana-shaped cantaloupe popular before 1900.

• www.rareseeds.com; Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Mansfield, Mo. This supplier offers a forum in which visitors can pose questions and comments on heirloom gardening. We peeked into the herb-seed listings and found edible chrysanthemums; basils in lemon, licorice and lime varieties; and Thai coriander for authentic flavoring. If you want to see them, however, you'll have to grow them, because illustration is rare at this site.

Home on the Web is an occasional feature in digs. The e-mail address is homeontheweb@seattletimes.com