Pale Garlic

Description

Allium pallens is a species of wild onion native to the Mediterranean region and Middle East from Portugal and Algeria to Iran. Allium pallens produces a single egg-shaped bulb. Scape is up to 50 cm tall, round in cross-section. Leaves are long, narrow, and fleshy. Flowers are bell-shaped, some nodding while others in the same umbel erect, the tepals white or pale purple with prominent green or purple midveins. A. paniculatum is placed within section Codonoprasum, subgenus Allium. There is some degree of uncertainty with regards to the relationships of taxa within the section. The Plant List gives A. pallens as an accepted name,but The World Checklist of Selected Plant Families treats it as a subspecies of Allium paniculatum, Allium paniculatum subsp. pallens (L.) K.Richt. Furthermore a number of synonyms listed in The Plant List, such as Allium sternii, are treated as separate species by The World Checklist. 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. Plants of the genus Allium produce chemical compounds, mostly derived from cysteine sulfoxides, that give them a characteristic onion or garlic taste and odor.