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Bear Leek / Medvjeđi luk
Allium ursinum
45.8182, 15.9726
Field Notes
Description:
It grows from 20 - 40 cm in high. In spring from its white or yellowish bulb usually grow 2 or 3 elliptical and pointy long leaves. Some time after leaves the flower grows too. It flowers before deciduous trees leaf in the spring, filling the air with their characteristic garlic-like scent.
The leaves of A. ursinum are edible; they can be used as salad, spice, boiled as a vegetable, in soup, or as an ingredient for pesto in lieu of basil. The stems are preserved by salting and eaten as a salad in Russia. The bulbs and flowers are also very tasty.
The leaves are also used as fodder. Cows that have fed on ramsons give milk that tastes slightly of garlic, and butter made from this milk used to be very popular in 19th-century Switzerland.
Habitat:
It is a wild relative of chives native to Europe and Asia.
It grows in deciduous woodlands with moist soils, preferring slightly acidic conditions.
Notes:
Known also as ramsons, buckrams, wild garlic, broad-leaved garlic, wood garlic, bear leek or bear's garlic, in Croatian: sremuš, divlji luk, šumski luk.
Latin name is given due to the brown bear's taste for the bulbs and its habit of digging up the ground to get at them; they are also a favorite of wild boar.
The leaves of A. ursinum are easily mistaken for Lily of the Valley, sometimes also those of Colchicum autumnale and Arum maculatum. All three are poisonous and possibly deadly. A good means of positively identifying ramsons is grinding the leaves between one's fingers, which should produce a garlic-like smell.
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