There's garlic (Allium sativum), and there are chives (A. schoenoprasum)—and then there are garlic chives (A. tuberosum, also called Chinese chives), brightening late-summer gardens with pretty globes of starry white flowers, dearly loved by the bees. You can snip the flat, narrow green leaves into salads, omelets, soups, and mashed potatoes, where they add color and a subtle garlic taste. The tender young leaves are best to cook with, so it's a good idea to shear the entire clump back to the ground every three or four weeks, to make sure that the leaves don't get tough and bitter. You can dry the snipped leaves for winter-time use, or pop them into small plastic bags and freeze them.
Now, about those tiny black seeds that will inevitably be produced by those pretty white flowers. You can collect them by tapping the drying seed head onto a plate and sprout the seeds for spicy salad sprouts. Or you can clip the seed heads while they're still flowering, dry them in paper bags, shake out the seeds, and add the pretty heads to your herbal wreaths. Or you can let Nature take its course, in which case you will have more garlic chives than you know what to do with. (Of course, they do make lovely passalong plants.) In cold regions, they'll die back to the ground and pop up again in the spring. Every two or three years, dig and divide the clump.
Oh, by the way: Chinese herbalists use garlic chives to stimulate the appetite, improve digestion, and fight fatigue—another reason to plant and enjoy this ornamental culinary and medicinal herb.
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The juice of Onions mix't with the decoction of Penniroyal...anointed upon a pild [bare] or bald head in the sun, bringeth the haire againe very speedily.
—John Gerard, The Herbal, 1597
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Read about the Allium allies:
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