Description:

• Bulbous herbs; bulbs enclosed in membranous scales, with onion-smell, bearing copious fleshy roots
• Leaves evergreen or deciduous, distichous, many, linear, smooth, firm, acute, entire, sheathing central, long, naked, stout scape
• Inflorescence umbellate, many-flowered, sometimes with bulbils, carried above leaves, enveloped by 1 or 2 green or scarious, persistent or caducous, spathes
• Flowers relatively small, usually very many and showy, pedicels firm, erect, spreading or cernuous
• Perianth: lobes equal in length, 1-nerved, cylindric to campanulate, free or forming a short tube, deciduous, splitting sideways, erect or spreading, deep to light blue or white, chartaceous, persistent
• Stamens arising from within perianth tube, loosely connivent, declinate, shorter or longer than perianth lobes, somewhat unequal; anthers small, dorsifixed
• Ovary ovoid or oblong, with 2-14 ovules per locule; style filiform, semipersistent; stigma apical, small; nectaries in septa of ovary
• Fruit globose
• Seeds 1-4 per locule, flattened, irregularly angled
• x = 7, 8

Nomenclature:

• Allium L.
  • Linnaeus: 294 (1753)
  • Baker: 407 (1897)
  • De Wilde-Duyfjes: 75 (1976)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 550, mainly northern hemisphere, including cultivated edible plants like *Allium cepa L. (Onion) and *A. sativum L. (Garlic)
• Southern Africa: Species 1: Allium dregeanum Kunth, Mpumalanga, Free State, Northern, Western and Eastern Cape, although there is some doubt whether it is of true regional origin