IF you’re sending off your seed orders this month, and fancy including something a little less familiar than potatoes and radishes, I’d suggest buying some liquorice seeds. It’s a surprisingly ornamental plant, and interesting to grow. The only thing is, you mustn’t be in too much of a hurry for your first crop.

Of course, readers in some parts of Yorkshire and Surrey may already have an old liquorice plant growing on their allotments, perhaps a souvenir of the days when Glycyrrhiza glabra was a commercial crop in Britain, and Pontefract cakes were made from home-grown rather than imported roots.

You’ll find the seeds offered in several catalogues, including Suttons (www.suttons.co.uk; tel 0844 326 2200), and there are also two-year-old plants on sale on the internet, which would give you a head start, but at a considerably higher price. If you know someone who’s already got a liquorice plant, you can propagate from it by taking root divisions in autumn or spring.