One of my favourite plants, Nectaroscordum siculum is now well up in my garden. The distinctive onion smell of its bruised leaves betray its allegiance to the onions.
The pendulous flowers of Nectaroscordum siculum are subtly coloured
It’s a quiet plant, with a cluster of bell-shaped flowers that hang down from the upright stems in summer. Dull cream, tinted with red and green, they are hardly showy but for that very reason blend well with nearly all other plants. Interestingly, when the flowers fade, the stems turn upwards as the seedheads develop. The BBC website recommends growing in gravel, but it also does well on steeply sloping banks at Lamport Hall, competing well the grass and cow parsley. It also copes well with light shade.
Like many bulbs, it’s a native of Turkey, south-east Europe and Ukraine. It’s also extremely easy to grow from seed (or simply allow it to seed itself).
Tags: BBC gardening, cow parsley, gravel gardening, growing bulbs from seed, Lamport Hall, Nectaroscordum siculum, ornamental onion, plants among grass, plants that seed themselves, plants that self seed, seed heads, Turkey, Ukraine
Andrew Mikolajski's Blog 
June 6, 2012 at 8:41 pm |
[…] tidier. As gardeners with strimmers are wont to do, I managed to decimate the emerging flowers of Nectaroscordum Siculum – and probably the large part of the foliage too. The unopened blooms in amongst tall grasses […]