Hello everyone!
I’m currently working on a project crossing various domesticated alliums with wild alliums that grow freely about the garden. It was an idea that I had after observing the abundance of natural alliums growing on the property. I then planted other varieties I found and let them all to flower.
I’ve now observed (for the first time) many supposed crosses occuring on the wild side of my garden (there is one side that is more garden, and another side that is open field). This helps drastically because on the wild side I don’t plant or manipulate anything, I only observe. This allows me to tell what crosses are with wild alliums and which are from the domestic alliums.
My only holdup now is that I can’t tell what is what. I have observed many different alliums of different shapes and colors. Red, pink, white, hollow leaf, flat leaf, semi hollow, matte, shiny, etc.
How do I distinguish onions, garlics, and leeks? From what I can tell there appears to be all three groups growing wild and producing seed on the property but I’m not completely sure. All advice welcome!
Hi Shao. I wouldn’t know either. Maybe with pictures, I could say something, but maybe taste them! I grow similar but keep them together more or less.
Do you have garlic which produces viable seeds? Or bulbils?
Hi Shao,
Let’s start from the beginning, it is impossible that these are garlics, or wild onions:
Garlic is found in Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan), and onion (Allium cepa) does not exist in nature and its closest wild species grows in Iran.
But it could be leeks and related species.
As for the identification of plants:
Know that the presence of bulbils in the inflorescence is very common and is often the reason for bad identifications among neophytes.
The shape of the foliage is the basis of the identification.
But to really know you have to look at the shape of the flowers (individual) and the length of their pedicels, the shape of the umbels.
Then the cloves will also provide you with a lot of information: the group of wild leeks (ampleloprasum complex), produces two sessile cloves (=without stems, like garlic cloves); and pedicellate cloves (with a pedicel = a stem), people often wrongly call them bulbils. (The bulbils are found in the umbels, but it will give you an idea of what they look like.) These are very important in identification according to their location, number, shape, size and colour.
If you have pictures, I could certainly help you identify them.
In Mallorca, I think you can narrow the list down to:
A. oleraceum (produces bulbils in the umbels)
A. vineale (produces bulbils in the umbels)
A. sphaerocephalon
A. ampeloprasum and A. commutatum of the ampleoprasum complex (to which the cultivated leek belongs: A. ampelorpasum subsp. porrum with which they are interfertile). (can occasionnally produces bulbils in the umbels)
When you have their names, you can look for their affinity but there are a lot of Allium species, and their interspecific sexual compatibilities are very limited.
This genus has about 850 species, separated into three evolutionary lineages; then into subgenus, then into sections, then into groups/complexes/alliances (term variable according to the authors) of species; within which they have total or partial sexual intercompatibilities.
I recommend this wiki page which is a treasure regarding the taxonomy of this immense genus:
Wow thank you for this response! I was not expecting such great detail. This was the exact information I had been searching for. I’m not quite sure where to go many times when looking for this sort of information and it surely doesn’t help that I don’t have a high level of botany knowledge. I see that part of the confusing about whether they’re onion or garlic comes from my misunderstanding of alliums related their common names rather than real botanical separations.
I’m out of town at the moment so when I get back I’ll look with greater detail. From what I can tell, there is A. Oleraceum present, A. Vineale present, a few variations that look like A. Triquetrum in both white and pink flowers, and most of them seem to most similar to A. ampeloprasum.
In regards to the leek looking alliums, I’ve found a few in the wild while foraging that are quite large (for wild ones) and brought them to the garden to add in. Most seem to produce seed from what I can tell. I also would not discount the idea that some seeds have been transported from the various alliums on the garden side via wind or birds.
I’m not sure now what might be the best followup to the project. They’re growing in copious quantities, as if it was a field of grass except they’re all variations of alliums. In the end that’s exactly what I’m looking for from the project. Perhaps making selections within the ones that appear to be A. Ampeloprasum could yield something interesting.