Yesterday, I introduced Agricultural Explorer David Fairchild who, inspired from visiting Japan, was determined to try to introduce udo (Aralia cordata) and wrote an interesting paper 120 years ago giving more details about this novel perennial vegetable:
Udo introduction to the US with cultivation instructions (1903)
11 years later in 1914, he wrote a really interesting report summing up his experiences with udo. It blows my mind to read how much work was done on this plant over 100 years ago, but sad to see that it was never adopted in a big way! You can read the whole report and I recommend you do, but I’ve picked out some titbits from the report that I found particularly interesting followed by a few other interesting excerpts from various inventories of introduced plants to the US!
Tag Archives: France
Allium x cornutum
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”