Wild Garlic
For many in the eastern United States there was only one member of the onion family ready to hand, wild in your lawn, schoolyard, and neighborhood park. The name I learned got the dark green spear clumped in the yard was “wild garlic.” I understood the “wild” because it tasted sharp, rude, and unconfined. I thought it was a wild plant . . . indigenous. But it wasn’t. Allium veneale was an introduction. Native to German and France it was an old onion that grew in vineyards in France and fields in Germany. It came over in the colonial period, spreading from Pennsylvania and Virginia. By the 2nd decade of the 19th century when it first is mentioned in botanical books treating American flora, it was said to be abundant from New York to Virginia. Nowadays its naturalized range extends from New York to eastern Tennessee and South Carolina.
It rarely seeds, and spreads by bulb partition. In the lawns of suburban Maryland outside D.C. no amount of lawn trimming would prevent the division of bulblets in more massed lawn garlic. In vacant lots the wild garlic spread via areal bulbets forming at the end of scapes.
Entirely edible, its sharp flavor and its readiness to naturalize upset persons across the spectrum of agriculture. Diary people deplored the taste it imparted in milk from cows that grazes on grass containing wild garlic . Some thought it tainted the flavor of meat. Since they grew in wheat fields, wild garlic spears would be combined into the harvest and impart a garlicy flavor to flour. If roller milled, the garlic would form a “varnish-like” coasting on the rollers degrading their ability to reduce grain to flour. Perhaps the most effective method of eradication was to train hogs to root out the bulblets from a field. Elsewise the wild garlic tended to persist.
All parts of the wild garlic are edible either raw or cooked. My mother snipped it for serving on cottage cheese, a substitute for chives. During my time living in England I was introduced to bear garlic, a different sort of wild garlic that I thought less racy in its pungency. The greatest change in attitude to wild garlic in the past 30 years has been the creation of pesto using wild garlic. The flavor is intensely vegetal and vibrant and can spark your lips.
It jumps up in my lawn early, sometimes before the grass itself wants to activate in the spring. It shoots up a dark green cluster of spike from the dormant lawn.
I just noticed it in my lawn today, here in Nashville. Going to use it in some Chinese noodles I'm making for lunch.
some say accelerated presence is driven by soil low pH.. this is definitely true in landrace cereal fields as you note. Presence diminishes to near zero when pH in production cereal fields is normal.