Wild garlic - also known as ramsons or bear's garlic - is not that well known in British cooking. This is surprising as it tastes much like garlic cloves and is widespread in damp woodland. Basically anywhere that bluebells grow well you can often find wild garlic too. It needs some shade, some light and should not be too dry.

When I lived in Germany many people used wild garlic in season either buying the leaves at a greengrocer or growing a small patch in their garden. Whole websites are devoted to the subject.

I enjoy garlic and wild garlic has the health-giving benefits of cultivated garlic such as reducing blood pressure and cholesterol. We established a wild garlic patch in our herb garden with a few bulbs and seeds and it has spread through natural seeding. It is not in the shade of a tree but a fence casts a shadow for most of the day.

 

With a mild (or no) winter the 2007 crop is well on its way! Some leaves are almost ready to be cut.

If you gather wild garlic in woods, it is usually easy to recognise. If the leaves are disturbed there is a strong garlic smell. However, two poisonous plants can look similar. Wild arum - or 'lords and ladies' has very similar shoots when they first come above ground and grows in very similar conditions. Wild arum shoots tend to come about one or two weeks earlier than wild garlic but can overlap.

 

The two plants can be accurately distinguished once the leaves are unfolded. In the photo above there are two or three wild arum leaves surrounded by wild garlic. The wild arum leaves unfold horizontally and have deep veins (and often black spots); they also are concave near to the stem. Wild garlic never has black spots or this vein structure, has a convex shape and tends to grow more vertically until the weight of the leaf tips it over.

The wild garlic leaves look very similar to lily of the valley leaves (which are also poisonous). However wild garlic stems are green while lily of the valley has dark red/brown stems.

When I first sowed wild garlic seeds, I sowed them in mid winter and expected to see them grow in my pot that spring. When nothing happened, I threw the soil away only to find that they germinated the following year. The first season after germination you just get a small leaf which should not be harvested (the leaf needs to photosynthesise to build up the bulb). The second year leaf is marginal and in the third year you get full-sized leaves.