As one of 13 kids raised on a North Dakota farm, Sara Wick learned early how to cultivate the soil. She and her siblings helped their parents raise the food for their table: beef, chickens, hogs, potatoes, corn, green beans, tomatoes, carrots. What they did not eat fresh they put up for winter's store.

In the Dallas garden of her adulthood, however, Ms. Wick raises flowers. Her bungalow is surrounded by landscape beds. The lot so overflows with flowers that the gardener had a run-in with the law. Code enforcement cited her last summer for a renegade datura. It had dared to inch out over the sidewalk with its large gray leaves and long, fragrant, white trumpets. (The code enforcer measured how many inches with a tape, according to neighbors who watched the proceeding.)

"The datura flopped over. My cosmos were all blooming and kinda wild. I had been out of town," says Ms. Wick. The spot of land between sidewalk and curb, at most houses filled with grass, weeds or bare dirt, is a traffic-stopping display at the Wick house, exuberantly in bloom from March until frost.

"The datura had put itself there," says the gardener, who received a citation but not a fine. "You go away for two weeks in summer and that stuff goes crazy. That's one of the drawbacks of being a free-spirited gardener in a conservation district."

She has lived in her 1918 house for 25 years. At first, she tended only a shallow perennial bed around a tree. "But every year it got bigger," says Ms. Wick, a geriatric nurse-practitioner at Parkland Memorial Hospital.

Eventually, she "got serious" and put a pond in the back yard, had trellises built to support climbing roses and created beds in front of the house, down the length of the drive and, eventually, to encompass the whole back yard.

Ms. Wick favors old-fashioned flowers appropriate for a cottage garden, such as heirloom roses, yarrow, peonies, columbine and poppies. There is no formality in the garden's design. Perennials, annuals, vines and shrubs sprawl and tumble according to their natural inclination, bobbing and weaving and leaning on each other in the English style.

Pass-along plants also figure in Ms. Wick's garden. As she points out examples of plants given to her, she names the giver and recounts the circumstances. There's butterfly ginger and crocosmia from a friend who brought starts from her mother-in-law's garden when she emigrated from Mississippi to Texas; daylilies divided from a coworker's plants; camellias dug up when a friend of a friend had to move away.

Likewise, she saves seeds to share. One of her long-spurred yellow columbines produced a bicolored hybrid whose spurs are maroon. She saves those seeds separately from the other yellow columbines to give away; any gardener who sees it always asks. She pulls up the tall stalks of somniferum poppies after seed pods have formed and stacks them, still green, to let the pods dry to brown. She collects the tiny seeds by shaking the pods like pepper from a can and stores them in a paper sack until August or September, when it's time to sow next year's plants. Although Dutch tulips will not repeat their showy performance in North Texas, and must be treated as annuals, Ms. Wick collects hers and her friends' tulip bulbs and ships them to her sister in Wisconsin, where tulips are perennials.

In the back yard, where beds are shady, red- and purple-leaved plants punctuate swaths of green. After a construction project last year destroyed many landscaped areas, the gardener had to start over. It was at this point that she inserted dark-leaved plants, including 'Forest Pansy' redbud; purple oxalis ground cover; a weeping Japanese maple with red, almost black, filigreed leaves; shrubby loropetalum; and purple-leaved basil.

"I noticed this year that the purple-leaved things budded out earlier [than specimens with green leaves]," she says. "I was concerned that my garden was all red. But as the green has all filled in, it's a nice accent."

In a turnabout, the farmer's daughter now puts her father to work on the land. She flies her parents to Dallas when winter lingers too long in South Dakota, where her parents now live, so her 90-year-old father can work the soil and make things grow.

Whether it's potatoes or petunias, the visceral reward is the same.

Caliper at Dallas Farmers Market, for annuals

North Haven Gardens, for herbs

Redenta's, for organics

Blue Moon Gardens in Chandler, for specimen plants