It will come as no surprise to those who grow vegetables, that the gorgeous ornamental Allium is a direct cousin to the ordinary onion that we grow for show or for eating.
For those who have never grown onions - the vegetables - it always seems to amaze, that the colourful - even spectacular - blooms of the ornamental Alliums can simply be 'onions'!
The pictures below will show the similarities.
On the left we have the vegetable onion - Allium cepa which has been left to grow to seed (not a good idea if they are for the plate!) On the right, the ornamental Onion - Allium giganteum. There are several other types of ornamental Onions - or Alliums, being ornamental Garlic and ornamental Chives.
Alliums are normally late spring flowering bulbs, but also flower into the summer, and hold their seed heads well into winter. There are also Alliums that flower in the Autumn.
Some Alliums are bulbous, whilst others have the thick roots normally associated with rhizomes. For the purpose of this page, they are all herbaceous perennials, but are almost unique amongst bulbs and even other types of plants, in that the foliage of most - certainly the larger types - will have withered by the time the flower heads form.