I love my nodding onions (Allium cernuum) as you can read in my book and the diversity of forms increases as each year passes, both as I introduce new varieties and as they self-seed….and the bees love them too..
Alliums in the botanical gardens in Gothenburg, Sweden on a visit on 16th June 2014. The first batch are from the under cover bulb garden, where watering regimes can be controlled. Not many species were flowering. This is one of the best bulb collections in the world with some 1,600 species!!
On Facebook with more discussion https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10152439429035860.1073742091.655215859&type=1&l=461d10dfe7
The first batch are from the under cover bulb garden, where watering regimes can be controlled. This is one of the best collections in the world with some 1,600 species!!
Allium sp. : this yellow Allium had seeded around quite a bit…
Allium sp..
This one’s a mouthful: Allium macleanii x jesdianum subsp angustipetalum
Allium karataviense
Allium parvum
Allium akaka
Allium tschimganicum
Allium barsczewskii f. rosea
Allium nigrum
Allium candolleanum
Allium acuminatum
Allium caesium
Allium colchicifolium
Allium scilloides
The next batch were all growing in the open garden… This was labelled Allium nanodes from NW China. However, Mark McDonough has commented “Not nanodes which is vey dwarf, maybe a form of ovalifolium or prattii)
Allium unifolium (I think) had gone wild in a few beds…
Allium unifolium (I think) had gone wild in a few beds…
Allium scorodoprasum
Allium scorodoprasum
Allium “Globemaster”
Crambe maritima, Crambe cordifolia and Allium Globemaster
Not garlic scapes as they’re not ready yet, but Chicago onion (Allium cernuum) scapes with Allium scorodoprasum scapes and Scorzonera scapes in tonight’s stir fry!
Scorzonera at top, Allium cernuum (bottom left) and Allium scorodoprasum (bottom right) scapes
Scorzonera at top, Allium cernuum (bottom left) and Allium scorodoprasum (bottom right) scapes
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!
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:
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”
Sand leek (rocambole) or Allium scorodoprasum gives bigger yields here than leeks, so it’s not surprising to learn that this perennial onion was probably cultivated by the Vikings (it is found naturalised near many old Viking settlements in Scandinavia) and I believe it is the original “geirlauk” (meaning spear onion) and the root of the word garlic in English… See also pages 215-217 in my book!
I hadn’t noticed the red base to the stems seen in these pictures before…
I used it in a quick scrambled egg dish together with Amish onion (Allium x proliferum), sorrel flower shoots, ground elder (Aegopodium), nettle (Urtica dioica), Hydrophyllum virginianum (water leaf) with golpar spice.
These pictures can also be seen on my 700 plus album of Allium pictures on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150966880345860The scapes of Allium scorodoprasum could certainly be described as spear-like
In June 2009, I was shown the only naturalised stand of victory onion (Allium victorialis) in south western Norway (away from Lofoten Islands – Vestvågøy – and Bodø area where there are several large populations). It’s found in a damp wood (which regularly floods in spring) along the Granvinselven. Please refer to my book Around the World in 80 plants for more information about this fantastic onion!! This onion can grow both in shady and full sun localities:
Proof one more time that north is best for growing a diversity of tasty salad greens ;) Presenting (and claiming) my new world winter salad diversity record, a salad with over 140 ingredients all harvested locally without using any additional energy than is available in my house and cellar (no greenhouse; no freezer; no fermenting involved and only dried fruit and seed used apart from fresh vegetables!). Despite the snow cover I was able to harvest some 20-30 edibles outside. More on how this can be done will be the subject of a separate post!
The salad was presented and eagerly devoured by those who had bought tickets for the Gourmet Cinema event on 9th March 2017 as part of the Trondheim Kosmorama Film Festival! It went so quickly, I didn’t even get a taste myself!
The film was followed by a Food talk with a panel including the film’s director Michael Schwarz, the head chef at Credo Heidi Bjerkan, myself and Carl Erik Nielsen Østlund, the owner of the biodynamic organic farm that supplies much of the food to Credo, moderated by Yoshi!
As Michael Pollan concludes in the film: Eat Food, Not too much and (as many as possible) mostly vegetables!
The day before, I had prepared a 105 ingredient salad for the festival dinner at Credo restaurant (http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=10184). While preparing that salad, I made a second salad with the same 105 ingredients…and then added almost 40 additional ingredients that I hadn’t had time to harvest the day before!
Perennial vegetables, Edimentals (plants that are edible and ornamental) and other goings on in The Edible Garden
Sorrel (Rumex acetosa) flowering stems
