Allium atropurpureum

totototo@telus.net totototo@telus.net
Wed, 23 Jun 2010 11:30:38 PDT
On 23 Jun 2010, at 11:48, Stephen Putman wrote:

> I bought a pot of Allium atropurpureum... It has just finished with producing
> some seed.  I ... noticed that one of the flower stalks was down. Closer
> inspection revealed about 17 bazillion ... little bulblets. ...how badly
> invasive is this plant?  Shall I get it out of the garden fast, or does it
> remain more or less in one place with just occasional escapees? 

Dig the bulbs up and burn them. Carefully lift as many of the bulblets as you 
can manage, and burn those too. Boil a very large kettle of boiling water and 
pour it over the area where the bulblets fell. Mark the spot for close 
attention in future years. If this doesn't work, perhaps you can find a small 
nuclear device on Ebay.

Admittedly your Delaware climate isn't the same as my cool Mediterrean climate 
in which alliums thrive, but my experiences with alliums proliferating 
uncontrollably have led me to abolish the entire genus from my garden, the only 
exceptions being Allium moly, and four locally native species. The difficulty 
is that commercial strains of alliums are selected for their ease of 
propagation, and if that includes bulblets in the flower head, underground 
offsets, and copious seed, so much the better.

Methods similar to those in my first paragraph took ten years to eradicate the 
near-allium Nothoscordum inodorum, and the commercial form of Allium roseum is 
proving to be equally difficult to eradicate, perhaps moreso.


-- 
Rodger Whitlock
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Maritime Zone 8, a cool Mediterranean climate
on beautiful Vancouver Island

http://maps.google.ca/maps/…


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