Few-flowered garlic

Allium paradoxum, commonly known as few-flowered garlic, is a bulbous perennial herb in the family Amaryllidaceae native to the woodlands of the Caucasus, northern Iran and adjacent western Asia, and widely naturalised as an invasive woodland species in Britain, parts of continental Europe and Scandinavia. The plant arises from a small ovoid white bulb 1 to 2 centimetres long that produces a single, soft, flat-linear basal leaf 15 to 30 centimetres long and 1 to 2 centimetres wide, of bright glossy green and emitting a strong garlic odour when bruised. The flowering scape is slender, three-angled and 20 to 40 centimetres tall, bearing at its apex a one-sided umbel in which most of the flowers are replaced by small egg-shaped vegetative bulbils about 5 millimetres long, with usually only one or two pendulous bell-shaped white flowers per umbel; the six tepals are 7 to 12 millimetres long. Reproduction is overwhelmingly vegetative through the bulbils, which fall to the ground and root readily, accounting for the species' aggressive spread in cool moist deciduous woodland and shaded riverbanks.