German garlic

Allium lusitanicum, the Portuguese or mountain onion, is a bulb-forming perennial of the Amaryllidaceae growing from short, clustered, narrowly conical bulbs attached to a creeping rhizome. The thread-like to narrowly linear leaves are flat or channelled, shorter than the flowering stem, and form low basal tufts. The scape rises to about 20 cm and bears a dense, hemispherical umbel of small star-shaped flowers in which the tepals, anthers and styles are all a uniform rose-violet, giving the inflorescence its characteristic coloration. The species is widely distributed across mainland Europe from Portugal east to Ukraine and from the Mediterranean north into central Europe on dry, rocky, calcareous slopes, but is absent from Iceland, Ireland, the United Kingdom and several lowland north-western countries.