Allium sphaerocephalon

Description

Allium sphaerocephalon

Allium sphaerocephalon has pear-shaped heads, densely packed with flowers which begin green and gradually turn a deep pinky-purple, the colour spreading from the top until the whole head is coloured. All the time the heads maintain their dense drumstick form, swaying on impossibly thin stems. Try naturalising in grass or in a prairie style planting. July. 60cm. From fields and dry verges from Britain, across Europe and North Africa to Israel.

Onions

The Onions – Genus Allium are a group of plants that confidently stride both the ornamental and the vegetable garden. There are species for both situations and some, like chives, that are equally at home in either. The representative for the vegetable garden are Onion, Leek, Garlic and Shallots.

Alliums are the largest Genus within their family with a count of around 450 species found throughout the Northern Hemisphere, largely in dry rocky terrain around the Mediterranean Sea, although some of the larger leafier varieties are found in grassland and a few, like our native Ransoms, are found in moist woodland. They are largely bulbous with heads of flowers arranged in a more or less spherical umbel ( a structure with all of the flower stalks originating from a single point ). They have a superior ovary, an arrangement whereby the seed producing part of the flower are within the cup of the petals. In some species this can be quite obvious as the ovary swells before the petals fade.

Alliums tend to get all of their leafy growing done before they push up a flower stem such that many, especially the globular headed Asian species, have withered their foliage when in full bloom. Dependant on species they can start into growth very early in the year, their foliage being one of the first signs that Spring is on the way. Some, such as Allium caeruleum start into leaf in the Autumn and grow into the winter.

The huge flower heads of the larger species cut and dry well, both when they are in full flower or later on as a seeding head.

Most of the Alliums prefer a well drained soil, a few like shade, but the vast majority are sun lovers.

Of all of the Alliums, Garlic is the one that has attracted the most folklore and legend. It was offered up at crossroads as a meal for Hecate bt the Greeks, who themselves ate it in quantity, although Horace considered it more poisonous than Hemlock. The Egyptians, according to Pliny, invocated Garlic as deities at the taking of oaths.

Mohammed tells that Garlic sprang from the ground where Satan’s left foot trod and Onion where his right foot trod after he stepped out from the Garden of Eden.

Hungarian jockey’s still attach Garlic to the bits of their horses following an old European tradition that a man who chews a small amount of Garlic will not be overtaken in a race.