My walking onions are about to take a hike.
These are also called tree onions, top-setting onions, or Egyptian onions. They’re originally from Canada, and became popular in kitchen gardens in the 1790s. Instead of making seeds, the flowers turn into little bulbils that drop off and form a new plant.
It’s kind of a standard-looking onion flower
but instead of making seeds, each little floret turns into a tiny bulb (this flower top has two more florets and the rest are already little bulbils.
These are mature bulbils, and if you look closely you can see new flowers forming at the top of some of the bulbils. When those top flowers form bulbils, the stalk is so overloaded that it bends to the ground and new onions will form where the little bulbs touch the earth. That’s the ‘walking’.
I saw this in a friend’s garden last year, and he gave me a few clusters of bulbils that I planted 15 miles away. In plant speed, that would be running really, really fast.
[bul·bil (bul′bil′) noun
a small bulb or fleshy bud on a flower stalk, as in some onions, or in the axil of a leaf, as in a tiger lily.]
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