It has been many years since I stayed up late enough to properly celebrate the turn of the New Year and even longer since I belted out the first verse of Auld Lang Syne. Nonetheless, I appreciate the annual reminder to toast old friends. My garden is full of them.

I need the reminder because plant and seed catalogs will begin arriving by snail- and e-mail any day now and I can’t resist the pull of the unknown. Whether a plant is listed as an introduction, a rarity, or a fresh offering from a trusted source, I’ll be tempted to find a spot for it in hopes that new finds become best friends. Old friends sometimes have to make way.

They don’t seem to mind. A generous nature is one of the great things about the plants that have stood the test of time in my garden. While most of the new hybrids and introductions have been developed for bigger, showier flowers and/or a longer bloom time, those traits can come at the expense of generosity and longevity. (Of course, there are plenty of exceptions among the newbies—Itoh or intersectional peonies that have come on the market lately are an outstanding blend of tree peonies’ dinner-plate flower power with herbaceous peonies’ staying power. And almost every new rose is a fragrant and disease-resistant keeper.) But whatever our old friends might lack in novelty they make up for in steadfastness and vigor.

Take regular old purple coneflower. Echinacea purpurea is a short-lived perennial that replaces itself by self-sowing. The bees, butterflies, goldfinches, and I can count on stems of its orange centered, hot-purple daisy rays to pop up here and there and even right where they always were, year after year. But when breeders select for showier flowers with extra petals (some of the new coneflowers look more like cheerleaders’ pom-poms than daisies) the plants’ energy ends up diverted away from seed production, and I have been disappointed by diminishing returns. In other cases, breeders select for sterility, which is generally* meant to trick plants into non-stop bloom. (*Sometimes sterility is selected to prevent otherwise invasive species from self-sowing.) For example, Geranium ‘Rozanne’ and Snow Princess sweet alyssum go from May to frost, which is pretty great, but they’ll never produce offspring by seed.

Meanwhile heirloom vegetables are enjoying a heyday and for good reason: they’re the plants whose merits include deliciousness and open pollination. So let’s also celebrate all of the ornamental plants passed down by generations of gardeners—with the exception, of course, of certain non-native invasive species that defy control and eradication—that are beautiful, useful, and easy to propagate. These old friends deserve heirloom status and a return to vogue as well.

Plants like gladiolus and plume poppy lend a Katherine Hepburn-esque elegance to a midsummer garden. Nasturtiums are already trendy enough for being edible, but also manage to be steeped in nostalgia. Ephemerals like corydalis and columbine (Aquilegia spp.) are the garden’s Greta Garbos that keep us tuned in to catch every appearance. And my garden wouldn’t be half as lively and interesting without plants like tall verbena (Verbena bonariensis), mountain mint (Pycnanthemum muticum), and butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) that are way too attractive to ever go out of style.

This year I’ll be on the lookout for the new sea holly with chartreuse foliage (Eryngium x zabelli ‘Neptune’s Gold’) even though it’s likely to be a short-lived passing fancy. And whether I find it or not, I’ll remember to toast my old friend Eryngium planum for its prickly cobalt clouds of thimble-sized mid-summer flowers buzzing with pollinators and its eagerness to return year after year.

Kristin Green is a Bristol-based gardener and author of 'Plantiful: Start Small, Grow Big with 150 Plants that Spread, Self-Sow, and Overwinter'. Follow her blog at trenchmanicure.com.