Know your onions: my Top Five alliums to buy right now
The third instalment in a special seasonal series for paid subscribers, featuring my favourite spring-flowering bulbs
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Gardeners can be real snobs. With most spring-flowering bulbs, we are content to refer to plants by their common or anglicised names: daffodils, tulips, bluebells, hyacinths. Not so the Allium genus, which we have all come to know by its much more proper, much loftier Latin name.
Oh yes, we’re all au fait with the Linnaean system of binomial classification when an Allium is involved! An Allium, you see, is a thing of beauty, a thing of wonder, a proud, upright, elegant addition to any garden border. An Allium is worthy of (and ubiquitous at) the Chelsea Flower Show; something you can price at £10 for a single bulb.
An “ornamental onion”, on the other hand, maybe not so much.
And yet that is all that an allium is: a fancy onion. Even labels such as “edible allium” in reference to supermarket varieties, and “ornamental onion” in reference to garden centre purchases, are misleading. All members of the allium family are edible (bulbs and flowers both), and all produce garden-worthy flowers.
In theory, you could pop a shop-bought onion in a pot today and enjoy its pompom-like bloom in May (as long as it hadn’t been chemically treated to extend its shelf-life). Likewise, there’s nothing stopping you from dicing up your Allium ‘Purple Sensation’ bulbs and using them in the base for an admittedly rather pricey curry paste (as long as they hadn’t been sprayed with harmful pesticides).
Whatever you choose to call them, whyever you choose to grow them, ornamental onions are a surprisingly varied bunch. When we think of alliums, we tend to call to mind the popular purple pompom varieties such as ‘Ambassador’, ‘Gladiator’, ‘Powder Puff’, and the volleyball-sized ‘Globemaster’. These are all lovely, adored by bees when in bloom, and boast attractive seed-heads that last well into the summer.
But these varieties – the ones that are usually included in garden centre-sold multipacks – make up merely the tip of the allium iceberg. There are some really special onions out there – here are my five favourites.