Lettuce Lollo Rossa

The Italian frilly red that brings a salad bowl to life. Lollo Rossa makes loose, deeply ruffled leaves shading from green at the base to deep burgundy at the tips, and once you have grown it an all-green salad looks a little plain.

It does not heart up, which changes how you use it. Rather than waiting for a dense centre and cutting the whole plant, you pick the outer leaves and the middle keeps producing — two or three months of salad from one plant.

The flavour is gentler than the bitter Italian reds like radicchio but far more interesting than an iceberg: slightly nutty, a touch mineral, pleasantly tender. The colour deepens in cooler weather, so spring and autumn plants are redder than midsummer ones.