Wild garlic

Around here, we have always called it wild garlic (Allium ursinum) but it is known by many different names: ramsons, cows’s leek, buckrams, broad-leaved garlic, wood garlic, bear leek, Eurasian wild garlic or bear’s garlic. Whatever you call it, it’s coming into flower in our copses.

Its specific name, ursinum, which means bear in Latin, references the brown bear’s supposed fondness for the bulbs when it awakens from hibernation in the spring.  So many of its common names in European languages involve bears – for instance ail des ours (garlic of bears) in French and Bärlauch (bear leek) in German – that it does seem probable that brown bears like wild garlic.

Perhaps one of the dangers, in times long past, of collecting wild garlic to supplement your meagre winter diet was meeting a brown bear intent on the same errand. You might well immortalise that encounter with a local name.

Header image: wild garlic © Clive Knight (SPCLNR April 24)