Wild onion

Wild onion

young wild onion leaves in early spring

Scientific classification

Kingdom:	Plantaeia
Subkingdom	Tracheobionta
Division:	Magnoliophyta
Class:	Liliopsida
Subclass:	Liliidae
Order:	Liliales
Family:	Liliaceae
Genus:	Allium
Species:	ursinum

Binomial name

Allium ursinum

Wild onion, ramsons or buckrams (Allium ursinum) is a wild relative of chives. The systematic name derives from the fact that brown bears like to eat the bulbs of the plant and dig up the ground to get at them, as do wild boar.

Wild onions grow mainly in swampy decidous woodlands. They flower before the trees get their leaves and fill the air with their characteristic strong smell.

The leaves are collected and eaten as salad, boiled or as a kind of pesto. They were used as fodder as well. Cows that have fed on ramsons give milk that slightly tastes of garlic, and butter made from this milk used to be very popular in 19th century Switzerland.

The first evidence of the human use of ransoms comes from the mesolithic settlement of Barkaer (Denmark) where an impression of a leaf has been found. In the Swiss neolithic settlement of Thayngen-Weier (Cortaillod-culture) there is s a high concentration of ransoms pollen in the setllement layer, this has been interpreted as evidence for the use of ransoms as fodder.