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| Wild Garlic; Allium vineale L. |
Lily Family; LILIACEÆ
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| Wild Garlic is a bulb, originally European, now a widespread troublesome weed in much of North America. Many kinds of Allium exist, including onions, garlics, scallions, leeks, shallots and flower-garden ornamentals. The species here treated as "Wild Garlic" is also called Wild Onion, Crow Garlic, Wild Chives, Stag's Garlic, and Field Garlic. None of the entire Allium clan (a large group it is) are weedier or more hated. |
| A little bulb, no more than about an inch in size, sends up soft, limp, bluish-green, hollow, tubular foliage. In shade these grass-like leaves are darker green and skinnier; in sunshine they prove bluer and stouter. Once the bulb reaches adequate size it sends up a rigid solid stem as high as four feet in June, atop which sits a round head of "bulbils" or "bulblets": baby bulbs that drop and sprout into little plants. Sometimes the stems bear two or three such bulbil clusters, and sometimes their tops send forth dainty little flowers on thread-like stalks. These flowers produce tiny, shiny, black seeds. Therefore, Wild Garlic can reproduce by several methods: underground bulb-offsets, bulbils, or seeds. But deep shade prevents it from making flowerstems. |
| This multiplicity of means to spread, combined with the plant's wide adaptability to varied soil types and sunlight exposures, make for a smugly successful weed. It may grow with impunity in ivy beds; juniper patches; with wild grasses; even in a large maple's shadow and leaf debris. It cares not where, but given a choice prefers sunshine and good garden soil. |
Because it is essentially evergreen, resilient, easily pleased and a notably flavorful wild-edible, it should be in every fresh-food lover's garden. For although its garlicky flavor is too strong to please many delicate palates when the plant grows wild in sunny, dry sites. Yet when cultivated in moister, shadier, richer soil, it is milder, more tender, juicier, less fibrous and very timely: as chives and so many other fair-weather friends bid us curt adieu on account of frigid winter whether, Wild Garlic bravely offers fresh wholesome greens. To combat its propensity to weediness, what better way than eating enough of it so to keep it within moderate bounds?
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Originally published as the Seattle Tilth newsletter Weed of the Month in January 1987, along with an illustration drawn by Jerri Geer.
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