Wildflowers in bloom
Brian Whyer (Sat, 19 Apr 2003 17:02:04 PDT)

I was amused at Brian Whyer's comments about killing the Alliums. On

my

hike Thursday we passed a small patch of Allium unifolium. Where I

live it

is almost always found in very wet spots where it can be quite

numerous,

but you don't see it expanding to other areas. In fact it barely grows

and

doesn't expand in my much dryer garden when I plant it in the ground.

I

once asked Jim Robinett why some of these California Alliums known for
there expansive qualities like Allium hyalinum which doubles for me in

pots

and never does anything in the ground don't do better for me in the

ground.

He speculated that they weren't getting water long enough, but who

knows.

On the other hand Allium triquetrum is an ever expanding pest in

coastal

northern California. I notice it these days up and down the road on

Highway

One. I'm not sure anyone has tried to kill it. Where I live people

frown on

using herbicides to kill the weedy things so mostly Cal Trans (the

highway

folks) just mows.

Perhaps I should say that in my dry chalky garden the few allium
unifolium are slowly declining. The invaded garden, where I introduced
them, is a heavy clay soil wet in winter, but now just starting to crack
up after a month with no rain. Both triquetrum and unifolium have seeded
in many hundreds, and in the latter case in a bed where I worked
manually through the soil only 2 years ago to clean it they are now back
and very healthy sized, probably from small bulbs I missed. Snowdrops,
camassia leichtliniii, leucojum aestivum, erythronium pagoda and dens
canis, fritillaria imperialis, the larger allium hybrids, and colchicum
hybrids all grow well there.

Some of the local woods around here are beginning to change from green
to blue with sheets of bluebells (English), another invasive plant when
it gets into the garden, even in my dry soil. A national survey of the
Spanish and English bluebells is commencing as the former is suspected
of interbreeding and dominating the local race. Note the bluebells of
Scotland, from the song, are campanula rotundifolia.

Brian Whyer, zone 8'ish, Buckinghamshire, UK