Allium L.
Green or glaucous scapose perennials with onion- or garlic-like odour. Bulb tunicate, solitary, or often with stipitate offset bulbs. Leaves 1-many, all basal, sheathing scapes to varying levels, usually linear, solid or hollow. Flowers white, yellow or pink, campanulate, in few- to many-flowered terminal involucrate umbels; spathe-valves 2, ± united; bulbils often present between flowers, occasionally replacing them; perianth-segments free or ± connate at base. Staminal-filaments simple, divided, or with lateral appendages. Capsule ovoid to globose, 3-lobed, loculicidal. Seeds black, ± angular to flat, usually 6. Spp. c. 450, widely distributed in N. Hemisphere, mainly in temperate regions. Adventive spp. 4.
Key
A. ampeloprasum L., wild leek, and A porrum L., the cultivated leek have also been recorded as growing wild in N.Z.; they differ from other spp. of Allium in N.Z. in having stamen-filaments of 2 kinds, the outer 3 entire, the inner 3 divided at the apex into 3 long points, the middle one bearing the anther. A. ampeloprasum is perennial with the stem ascending from between 2 bulbs in a common tunic; it was first recorded in North Auckland by Cheeseman (T.N.Z.I. 15, 1883, 293) at Doubtless Bay (AK 95699is from Mangonui, T. F. Cheeseman, undated), and has recently been collected at Coopers Beach, in grassland, -A.T. Dobson, 5.12.1974(CHR 284144), on a roadside near Awanui - G. B. Rawlings, Dec 1976 (CHR 309146), and again at Doubtless Bay-C. Bearsley, 11.12.1977 (AK 143325). A. porrum is annual or biennial with the stem a continuation of the solitary elongate bulb; it was first recorded by G.M Thomson (Nat. Anim. Pl. N.Z. 1922, 482) in the Marlborough Sounds and has recently been collected in the Dunedin Harbour area, on waste land - A. J. Healy 57/297, 29.1.1957 (CHR 121720).
