Cultivated Garlic Allium sativum
Cultivated Garlic is an introduced perennial herb, found in Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 1.3 ft and blooms Jun – Jul.
More about this plant
Garlic is a species of bulbous flowering plants in the genus Allium. Its close relatives include the onion, shallot, leek, chives, Welsh onion, and Chinese onion. Garlic is native to Central Asia, northeastern Iran and the foothills of Himalayas. It has naturalized in many other parts of the world, including Mediterranean Europe and China. There are two subspecies and hundreds of varieties of garlic. Wikipedia →
Cultivated Garlic is flagged invasive in the U.S. These natives fill a similar niche — same growth habit, bloom season, height, and region — so you keep the look and feed local wildlife instead of spreading a problem.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 5 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 1.3 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~21 caterpillar species
Allium supports ~21 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a moderate genus.
Recorded feeding on Allium in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 16 bee visitors
16 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Cultivated Garlic — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 1 mammal · 3 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Cultivated Garlic — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 mammal species (fruit, seed, browse):
3 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Related plants
More Allium →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (23) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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