What your garlic will do in July if you let it. I forgot that I was going to let one go to flower this year and harvested all the scapes and the bulbs themselves last weekend, but I managed to snatch these out of the community garden garbage when an old garden plot was cleared out this weekend for new gardeners. The flower of garlic is about as fantastic as any decorative allium I've seen, though I've admitted before that I'm pretty much a sucker for most of them.
Update: Waiting on Joe's garlic scape to open to see what kind of bulbils they produce. The flowers above, while they smelled like garlic are probably from an elephant garlic plant. Joe tells me his garlic never flowers so spectacularly. Bummer.
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I had no idea that's what garlic did. I have never grown it, or even seen it grown, and I don't even quite understand what's going on with garlic scapes. Wow.
Can't say I understand it all either. I have an old Herb book that describes garlic as having white flowers and seeds. But everything else I read tells me that garlic no longer (or rarely) flowers and sets seed. And that it produces bulbils when the scapes open. Down at the community garden people have what I think is called elephant garlic (but may be more closely related to a leek) that flowers like in the picture above. I took the flowers out of the garbage and they smelled like garlic. Joe did leave one of his scapes in the garden so I'll see how it opens and if it produces bulbils. I think I'll have to update the post.
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