Plant lust. It's a terrible thing. I stay up late studying the new crop of garden catalogs, pretending I have the money, garden space and time enough to grow everything I see on their impossibly perfect pages.

Very, very rarely I come across a passage in which gardeners in other parts of the United States are wishing for our climate so they could successfully grow a flower they lust after. Imagine that.

I had one of those self-satisfied moments reading Old House Gardens – Heirloom Bulbs' current newsletter. In it, the Ann Arbor-based mail-order enterprise leads off with an evocative quote from the late Southern garden writer Elizabeth Lawrence: "Luscious as a bowl of raspberry sherbet."

She was referring to a pink rain lily, Zephyranthes grandiflora, "the best known of all the zephyr lilies." Brought from Central America in 1825, its broad, rosy petals open wide on 6- to 10-inch stems, mostly in early summer.

The lilies, instructs the seller, need hot summers to bloom well. In zones colder than Zone 8, the catalog (10 for $6.75) suggests readers resort to raising rain lilies in pots.

You'd really have to lust after them to be willing to grow them in pots, keeping an eye on watering needs in summer and lugging the container out of Jack Frost's reach as winter approached.

I have several patches of rain lilies. Pink flowers, white bloomers and an uncommon, just-acquired golden yellow one. It's laughable how easy the pink rain lilies are to grow. Plant them and forget them.

Their dense, grasslike foliage stays green all year. After heavy downpours in summer and autumn, I'm surprised by a new crop of short, pink flowers that open to 3 inches across.

You can buy rain lily bulbs already acclimated to our heat. Southern Bulbs in Golden, Texas, near Mineola, raises them in the sandy soil of a former sweet potato farm and sells them online for $10 for a package of three (www.southernbulbs.com). Look for them, too, at local garden retailers and at www.oldhousegardens.com.

When a company's initial offering is liquid fertilizer made from earthworm manure and packaged in plastic pop bottles, there are bound to be more surprises in store.

New Jersey start-up TerraCycle also produces bird feeders and household cleaners packaged in recycled plastic bottles and zippered bags fashioned from juice pouches.

Just as trash is valuable to this young company, so is the urban art form often considered in similar terms: graffiti. One of TerraCycle's newest products is 8-inch flower pots manufactured from 100-percent e-waste (discarded, crushed computers and fax machines).

The molded plastic pots are decorated with patterns rooted in tagging, the colorful spray-painted designs executed by inner-city youth. In fact, TerraCycle's pots are decorated individually by inner-city artists in rusty red, green and blue colorways.

Urban Art Pots are $9 each at Home Depot stores. Additional pot sizes are in the works.

There seems to be a buzz building about the hardy annual Cerinthe major (pronounced ser-IN-thee). A member of the borage family, it is commonly called honeywort because it has been a useful bee plant since ancient times.

The typical form has small, tubular yellow flowers, but knowing gardeners prefer C. major var. purpurescens; its clasping leaf bracts are bluish-purple with drooping flowers of blue edging toward purple. Leaves are gray-green.

It's pictured in several of this season's mail-order seed and plant catalogs. So I pulled out my reference books to see if I could glean any clues about successfully growing it in Dallas. Remember, plant labels and seed packages have broadly general information. Even if growing instructions mention suitability for Zones 7 (north of LBJ Freeway) and 8 (south of LBJ), Trenton, N. J., also is considered Zone 7 and Portland, Ore., is Zone 8. No one would suggest we have climates identical to those locales.

Garden writer Eileen Powell calls it "a stunning plant for the temperate border."

Wayne Winterrowd in Annuals and Tender Plants for North American Gardens says cerinthe is "a plant to be grown more for the pleasures of close study than for masses of high-impact color. The plant is beautiful in all its parts, but none carries the forceful assertiveness typical of the most popular annuals for summer bedding."

Cerinthe doesn't like hot weather, and it doesn't like to be fertilized. It should be sown in place now, and its success will depend on how quickly summer temperatures arrive to make it flag. Accordingly, plant it in part shade and protected from afternoon sun.

It could be that it's better to sow fresh seed in late summer, the same as larkspur and somniferum poppies, where they will sprout and develop through the fall to bloom the following spring. They perish in hot weather, too.

I have not noticed cerinthe plants for sale locally in past years, but I'll be looking for it. Meanwhile, it's worth the investment in a packet of seeds.

www.reneesgarden.com, 1-888-880-7228;

www.parkseed.com, 1-800-213-0076;

www.seedrack.com;

www.nickys-nursery.co.uk;

www.tmseeds.com, 1-800-274-7333.