Know your Wild Onion
Know your Wild Onion - Introduction
Wild Onion (Allium canadense), also known as Meadow Garlic, Tree Onion, Wild Garlic, and Canadian Garlic, is a perennial plant native to North America.
It has an edible bulb covered with a dense skin of brown fibres and tastes like an onion.
The plant also has strong, onion-like odour.
Though the plant is edible, it pays to be careful in identifying it as there are several look-a-likes.
Wild Garlic (Allium vineale) is similar, but that has a strong garlic taste.
Know your Wild Onion - Botany
Leaves
Basal, linear, glabrous, to +40cm long, 2-7mm broad, green to pale green, with a broad shallow groove adaxially, sometimes folding at the base, pale green to whitish at the base.
Inflorescence
Terminal umbel of zero to many flowers.
Sometimes the flowers replaced with reddish bulblets.
Sometimes inflorescence a combination of bulblets and flowers, or all flowers.
Bulblets sessile.
Flowers with pedicels to +4cm long, glabrous, erect.
Pedicels much longer than the flowers.
Bud of inflorescence covered with a scarious tan bract.
Bract persistent at the base of the umbel after anthesis.
Flowers
Tepals 6, pink to white, glabrous, oblong-lanceolate, to +/-8mm long, +/-3mm broad.
Stamens 6, erect.
Filaments pinkish, glabrous, expanded at the base, adnate to the base of the tepals, +/-5mm long.
Ovary subglobose, glabrous, 3-locular.
Style glabrous, +/-5mm long, pinkish.
Ovules 3-4 per locule.
Summary
Wild Onion's sparse cluster of grass-like leaves, see right, and its 8-12 in. flowering stalk grow from a bulb.
From between narrow, grass-like leaves, which originate near its base, rises a stem topped by a dome-like cluster of star-shaped, pink or whitish flowers; the plant has strong, onion-like odour.
The flowers are hermaphrodite (have both male and female organs) and are pollinated by bees and other insects.
It typically flowers in the spring and early summer, from May to June.
This native perennial has a brown, fibrous skin on an edible bulb that tastes like onion.
Know your Wild Onion - Cultivation
The preference is full or partial sun, and moist to mesic conditions.
This plant also grows in light shade in woodland areas, but is less likely to flower.
Growth is best in a fertile loam, although other kinds of soil are tolerated.
This plant also tolerates some drought.
Wild Onion spreads readily by means of offsets and bulblets, but often fails to produce viable seeds.
Know your Wild Onion - Uses
The juice of the plant is used as a moth repellent, and the whole plant is said to repel insects and moles.
The plant can be rubbed on exposed parts of the body to protect them from the bites of scorpions and lizards.
Flower-heads replaced by bulblets
Stems
From a bulb.
Bulb covered with a dense network of criss-cross fibres.
Fibres tan in colour.
Bulb to 3cm long, ovoid.
Aerial stems to +40cm tall, erect, glabrous, terete, single to multiple from the base, simple.
