Ramsons
Allium ursinum (Ramsons)
Flower head
Better known locally as wild garlic, this is a common woodland plant in the north east of England (and most of Britain), typically filling whole banksides with its large flat leaves and white flowers that look like blobs of cream.
The leaves are among the first things to come out of the ground in spring; neatly rolled up and poked through the keyhole, as it were. Slender and pointed as they are, they can look very similar to Lords-and-ladies (Arum maculatum), but those tend to be a bit fatter and often have a slight purplish tinge to them. As the leaves unroll, you'll also notice that the garlic is quite thin and flimsy, whereas the Lords-and-ladies tends to be a bit firmer and more bobbly-looking. Of course, the easiest way to tell them apart is to pick a bit and give it a little snifter, it couldn't be more obvious.
Because of the way the leaves are curled over, it is actually the underside that points upwards to catch the sunlight, while the top faces down. That might just be an interesting morphological factoid to you and me, but can it be proven? Yes, just pop 'em under a microscope and look for the stomata (the little mouth-like cellular arrangements that plants breathe through).
The leaves turn yellow and die down in summertime, but the smell lingers for a long time while the leaves are decomposing into sludge, so whenever you're in the woods, you nearly always get this lovely garlicky smell. Just the thing on the first warm evenings of the year.
The flowers are quite nice for peppering a salad (why not mix them with chive flowers, for extra colour). The leaves are edible too; try doing them with shallots, ginger and chili, or cook them as spinach and mash them into a pot of potatoes. The usual advice applies, of course; don't pick anything too close to a road (you don't want lead and PM10s in your dinner), make sure the place is reasonably free from dog pollution (it's organic all right, but not terribly good for you), and wash off any bird squits (you don't want to catch Salmonella) - but don't worry, it's perfectly safe! And of course, make sure there's enough left for everyone else; so enjoy and use, don't destroy and lose.
As you know, the Welsh associate St. David with the leek; and he may well have eaten lots of Ramsons in spring, because it grows everywhere down in Wales. The word ramson comes from the Old English hramsa, hramse, and the plural, hramsan (so ramsons is actually a double plural).
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