You have only to brush past them to release a smell so palpable you can almost see it It is also wildly invasive. The seeds are spread by ants and they evidently love their work.Garlic chives (Allium luberosum) are much easier to accommodate. The leaves are long and flat (with both these garlics, use the leaves rather than the bulb) and the flavour mild. It has small round heads of white flowers like an allium (which it is). The leaves are what is politely described as "pungent", too pungent by far for a small garden, I would have thought. Plant the much prettier buckler-leaved sorrel in a windowbox between love-in-a-mist.It has never occurred to me to plant wild garlic in the garden; there are acres of it flowering now in the nearby woods. Use common sorrel with mint and garlic chives in a big pot kept well watered in a shady corner.

They will probably need renewing every couple of years as they are weakened by constant picking.If you let a plant run to seed, you will have more than enough replacements Both will grow in pots, but not the same one. Buckler-leaved sorrel grows in the mountains of central and southern Europe, east as far as Turkey and Iran where it chooses stony slopes for its home. In the garden, it will thrive in drier, better drained soils than the common sorrel. Both these sorrels are perennials, so you need only buy a few plants to set out in a herb or vegetable garden. The common sorrel makes an altogether more upright, dominant plant, the leaves growing from the base. After the first year, it produces rust-coloured spikes of flower which then scatter seed with all the abandon of a canary on a spree. Common sorrel is native in Britain and many other European countries, growing in grassy places in cool, moist soil This is what it will want in the garden.

Most sorrels look suspiciously like docks, but the buckler-leaved sorrel is the least weed-like, with arrow-shaped leaves on a sprawling, lowgrowing plant. The over- indulgent Romans munched on raw sorrel to offset the effects of too many banquets. High-flying chefs serve it steamed and pureed to balance the savour of rich meat such as pork The flavour is pungent, lemony, quite bitter. Like dandelions and nettles, both of which are better cooked than fouling up the garden, common sorrel provides iron-packed fodder at a time in spring when there are few other fresh greens to eat. The central court has been turned into a double-height reception room, with a galleried study where the spectators once sat and a dado rail where the red line used to run across the front wall.The rest of the premises have been turned into three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen/breakfast room and dining room and the asking price is a hard- hitting pounds 835,000.. Now Foxtons in South Kensington (0171-370 5433) is selling a three-bedroom maisonette in what was once a squash court. And they would do better to choose the agent most likely to sell their house quickly and at a good price; without a buyer they will have no need for a new mortgage.Many properties began life as schools, railway stations, churches or even Knightsbridge broom cupboards before being converted into homes.