Ornamental Onion Fun in the South

Most onions, edible and ornamental, evolved in the middle East, Southern Europe or other Mediterranean climates— where summers see almost no rain and limey soils bake and crack. If you grew up like that, you’d probably hate our humid, fungus-rich air and soils in the Deep South too. Most allium rot here.

Long ago, I did a trial of every commercially available allium. I laid it out like this: 25 bulbs of each taxa planted in three different gardens. Each space with strikingly different cultural conditions. I repeated this for 2 years. The results showed that only three of the Allium actually perennialized: A. moly, A. unifolium and A. triquetum.

They are cute. Little and cute.

But I grew up looking at bulb catelogues with big, purple balls — Allium ‘Lucille Ball.’ The cute ones don’t cut it.

My friend Jim Martin coaches people to be ok with that. Jim says we should enjoy the fat, gray winter leaves. Enjoy the moment the buds emerge. After flowering, he says, cut the flowers, dry them and enjoy them inside for months.

I’ve always said, ‘I better take some of Jim’s advice, cause he has plenty to spare.’ So I’m not worried about perennializing right now. I’m living in the moment with an old seductress, the huge flowered, Allium schubertii. It’s also called Tumbleweed Allium since after flowering, it’s soft-ball sized flowers dry perfectly, making sculptural spheres that last all summer and presumably roll around in the breeze.

But I’ve stumbled finding inspiration to get them in the right place.

How do you best show off a plant like this? Any creative thoughts? Leave a comment below. Or join me in experimenting. Try the Tumbleweeds. Here’s a link.

Order now, through the weekend and I’ll send you an extra for free.

I’m thinking single plants like sculptures (like in this video).

Or maybe they should be in a geometric grid. I have a huge, square tub that I think I’ll plant with Tumbleweeds in a grid pattern with a prostate ground cover underneath — micro clover maybe. That’s tomorrow. Today, I found an old pic in my phone,

Melodie Scott-Leach of Riverbanks has metal sculptures of Allium schubertii. She spray paints them ever summer. But as you know, if you read the book, Melodie is definitely a garden disruptor.

The book got it’s first review this week! Dr. Tom Mack reviewed this book and mentioned my others — you can find via your search engine. It’s running in Free Times and tomorrow in Aiken Standard. Both of those are Charleston Post and Courier papers. If your town is a P&C paper (Greenville, Charleston, Hilton Head and a dozen more) Please ask them to run this!