#bear's garlic

[balkanradfem]

Found a broken bottle in the forest, and moss grew inside it!

[shiningmorninglight]

Spring is near...♥

[regnum-plantae]

Allium ursinum, Amaryllidaceae

If you have ever walked in the woods in temperate parts of Europe, particularly in the British Isles, you might have happened to smell something garlicky during spring, right when the buds are breaking up in the trees. Ramsons, wood or bear’s garlic - it is known in a few more ways just in English - was probably the culprit. Here in Scotland its white star-shaped flowers follow the small and often solitary ones of A. paradoxum, another common Allium which I’ll write about in a different post. 

All parts of the plant are edible and often harvested from the wild, but it is also easy to establish in a garden, especially in the shady and humid areas avoided by many other plants with higher light requirements. If you are foraging in the woods I would suggest harvesting the plant when the flower stalk has already given away its identity, together with the smell, as the young shoots emerging from the ground can be pretty similar to some toxic spring geophytes, like Convallaria majalis, the lily of the valley. I remember A. ursinum in the woods in northern Italy, but it looks a lot more at home and plentiful here in Scotland. 

[balkanradfem]

Bear's garlic season has started!! I have found my new source of food <3

[balkanradfem]

Bear's garlic, one of the most delicious wild edibles. I recommend to anyone to try and put it in a pasta salad! Incredible results.

[balkanradfem]

Finally found Bear's garlic! I've been looking for this plant for years. It's incredibly tasty! Made a pesto from it.

[over70isolation]

Day 27  Ground hog days.

The days all merge into a single event, with no differentiation between any of them. Apart from the food deliveries there is nothing entered in the diary, but today a new event had to be recorded. The AGM of Adonis Village, where we have a home in Cyprus, has changed from June until October. The poor dust covered diary actually smiled at me as I opened the relevant pages. I smiled back. How sad is that?

Lovely walk today beside the River Bourne and across the countryside north of Chobham. Said hello the the goats and chickens that we met on day 4. Just as friendly today as they were then.

Sylvie made the find of the day when she spotted a small clump of Bear’s Garlic. Beautiful clusters of white flowers.

Allium ursinum, known as wild garlic, ramsons, buckrams, broad-leaved garlic, wood garlic, bear leek or bear's garlic, is a bulbous perennial flowering plant in the amaryllis family Amaryllidaceae. It is a wild relative of onion, native to Europe and Asia, where it grows in moist woodland.[2]