Field trip near Vienna

Simon from Arche Noah kindly took me on an early morning botanical excursion to Eichkogel on the outskirts of Vienna during my visit in June 2017. This is a 428m high hill, part of the Northern Limestone Alps…with a rich diverse flora and fauna…here’s a photo album of some of the plants we saw…no time to ID some of the plants we saw…please help if you can…

The Utrecht Allium Border

Probably the best display of Alliums I’ve seen, a special project this year at the Utrecht Botanical Garden, showing off the diversity in the onion family!
Quite a few of the plants were sourced from the Dutch Allium maestro, Wietse Mellema, without whom  (and Gerard van Buiten) I doubt it would have been this special!
Enjoy!

Utrecht Edimentals

Utrecht in the Netherlands has one of the great botanical gadens in Europe alongside Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh, Gothenburg and Kew Gardens​! I had a stopover for a few hours on my way to Austria on 9th June and being relatively close to the airport this was the natural place to go for the edimental fancier! So, here is an album of edible plants I spotted that day! It was good to meet my FB friend Gerard van Buiten​ in the flesh for the first time too! Another post will show pictures of the Allium border which is new this year!

Allium x cornutum

This is Allium x cornutum, a topsetting onion hybrid. One of the parents is Allium cepa, but the second is as far as I know unknown! I dug it up today, replanted many of the smaller bulbs to see how much they produce in one year and also some of the larger ones. The rest will be eaten!
This one originating in Croatia  was the only one of 3 accessions from Gatersleben in Germany that has proven very hardy here (although a French accession survived a few years; the other was from India)! The picture below shows all 3 accessions received in August 2009:
A. cornutum

Croatia only flowered once (picture) in 2012 and  it had only one flower head. It has small bulbils and pinkish flowers.
These onions below were growing very densely in a patch about 25 x 15 cm..

In summer 2017, I found  an onion called  «Sint-Jansui» (Allium fistulosum var bulbifera  – this is the old name for Allium x cornutum, it’s not Allium fistulosum) in the Utrecht botanical garden:

Botanist Gerard van Buiten at Utrecht told me the following:

“Ah, I see you have found our “St Jansuien”! Yes, it is an old local variety, grown around Utrecht. One of our gardeners used to grow it on his nursery a long time ago. Every year on “St. Jansdag”, a box of onions was delivered at Paleis Soestdijk, where Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard used to live. It is grown nowadays in some urban garden projects in the city”

 

 

Rapunsel

Phyteuma spicatum is the most popular bee plant in my garden at the moment and a great edimental….a very old root vegetable in Europe, mentioned already by Gerard’s Herball from 1597, but best known as a vegetable in France and Germany.
These pictures are from a bed in my garden where I originally planted Phyteuma nigrum (P. spicatum subsp. nigra) many years ago. It must have crossed with other plants elsewhere in my garden as there’s now a range of colours from white to almost black!
The name rapunsel is related to rapa (turnip) due to its use as a root vegetable!

This video was taken in June 2016 during the big diamond back moth invasion..

Vert de Montmagny Ameliore

A French Dandelion cultivar, early and productive with very long leaves!

Perennial vegetables, Edimentals (plants that are edible and ornamental) and other goings on in The Edible Garden