Gardening : <i> Rumex scutatus</i> , French sorrel

Perennial herb with tender leaves and clusters of small red flowers.

French sorrel’s complex sour flavor is the main component in a classic French soup and several sauces, and this alone is reason enough to grow it. Another: Sorrel is rarely if ever found on supermarket shelves, being quite perishable. And still another: It grows in Southern California with little water and less care.

Sorrel isn’t the most beautiful herb in the garden; the rather plain, light-green leaves look like large arrowheads, offering no subtleties of coloration or shading. Sorrel just sits there, a pleasant mound that will eventually reach about two feet in height and in diameter. For gardeners in frost-free areas, sorrel is constant, providing the cook with abundant leaves throughout the year from the coolest winter to the hottest summer.

Sorrel is related to a wild herb called wild sorrel (Rumex obtusifolius) or dock. The wild version has coarser leaves and a more bitter taste. The common culinary species, Rumex acetosa, requires a moist, semi-shaded location. French sorrel is the one that can take heat and drought. If you have tried unsuccessfully to grow sorrel from seed, you may have been sowing common sorrel seeds; many seed companies just sell “sorrel” without any qualifier.

Once you have located the seeds, plant them indoors in potting soil or outdoors in the garden any time between now and the end of March. Don’t let them dry out because they don’t become drought-tolerant until maturity.

Be sure to thin the plants when they start to crowd each other, and continue thinning until plants are at least 1 foot apart. Put transplants in the garden when they’re about 3 inches tall.

Unless you are addicted to cream of sorrel soup, you probably won’t need more than two plants. But then, sorrel’s leaves and flowers make a greenish-yellow dye, and one book claims that a strong infusion of these leaves will clean your linen, wicker and silver, although I have not tried this. Maybe you’ll want several plants.

* Taylor’s Herb Gardens Inc., 1535 Lone Oak Road, Vista, Calif. 92084 (catalogue $1) offers both acetosa and scutatus seeds; they also have French sorrel plants.

* Nichols Garden Nursery, 1190 N. Pacific Highway, Albany, Ore. 97321 (catalogue free) has the Rumex acetosa seeds that grow like scutatus .