Asarabacca

Not all alliums look like chives or the garlic used in cookery. Ram- sons, which grows in open as well as shaded deciduous groves, flood-plain forests, and mountain beech woods, is a species with broad leaves vaguely resembling those of Great Plantain.

In western Europe, it forms distinctive communities in hornbeam woodlands. Together with many other herbs it contributes to the wealth of their undergrowth. It also occurs in acid soil, oak forests, or rather testifies to their subsidiary development where oak/hornbeam stands once stood. Greater Stitchwort is common in fertile soils, waterside thickets, and on colluvial as well as alluvial deposits. It also occurs in hedgerows, shrub growth, and forest margins.

Ramsons’ association with various kinds of forest indicates a certain adaptability to soil acidity: it is a plant which likes some acid soils as well as some neutral to slightly alkaline soils.

Asarabacca is a perennial herb with creeping branching rhizomes which spread thickly in the surface layers of the soil. In the wild, as well as under cultivation, it forms vast ground-covering masses.

Both Greater Stitchwort and S. nemorum are perennial herbs. Greater Stitchwort forms loose tufts and has a slender creeping rhizome from which rise quadrangular stems with long narrowly-lanceolate opposite leaves which are joined at the base. The corolla is much longer than the calyx.

The slender rhizomes of Wood Stitchwort give rise to flowering as well as non-flowering glandular-pubescent stems with large stalked leaves. The bottom stem leaves are smaller than those on the upper part of the stem. The leaves below the flowerheads are also sessile but are always much wider than the sessile leaves of Greater Stitchwort. Both stitchworts flower from April until June. The fruit is a capsule which splits to the base by six valves. The seeds are small, rounded, and tubercicd.