Crinkled Onion

Description

Allium crispum is a species of wild onion known by the common name crinkled onion. It is endemic to California, where it grows along the Central Coast in the Coast Ranges and in the Santa Monica Mountains, often in clays and serpentine soils. It is a perennial herb that is typically found in the foothill woodlands and valley grasslands of California. Allium crispum grows from a bulb one to one and a half centimeters wide and sends up naked green stems topped with inflorescences of many flowers, each on a short pedicel. The flowers are magenta in color and have six triangular tepals. The inner three tepals are smaller and crinkled like cloth and may curl under. Anthers and pollen are yellow. The leaves are narrow and linear, typically slightly shorter than the stems and about 1.5 millimeters wide. A. crispum reaches 10-20 centimeters tall. Flowers typically appear between March and June in the US. The plant prefers part shade. Allium is a genus of monocotyledonous flowering plants that includes hundreds of species, including the cultivated onion, garlic, scallion, shallot, leek, and chives. The generic name Allium is the Latin word for garlic, and the type species for the genus is Allium sativum which means "cultivated garlic". Carl Linnaeus first described the genus Allium in 1753. Some sources refer to Greek ἀλέω (aleo, to avoid) by reason of the smell of garlic. Various Allium have been cultivated from the earliest times, and about a dozen species are economically important as crops, or garden vegetables, and an increasing number of species are important as ornamental plants. The decision to include a species in the genus Allium is taxonomically difficult, and species boundaries are unclear. Estimates of the number of species are as low as 260, and as high as 979. Allium species occur in temperate climates of the Northern Hemisphere, except for a few species occurring in Chile (such as A. juncifolium), Brazil (A. sellovianum), and tropical Africa (A. spathaceum). They vary in height between 5 cm and 150 cm. The flowers form an umbel at the top of a leafless stalk. The bulbs vary in size between species, from small (around 2-3 mm in diameter) to rather large (8-10 cm). Some species (such as Welsh onion A. fistulosum and leeks (A. ampeloprasum)) develop thickened leaf-bases rather than forming bulbs as such.