Wild onion
Allium textile and Allium cernuum
Also called Prairie onion, Nodding onion
We do not have a Blackfoot or Cree name for this one yet. Tell us the name and we will add it, with your word on where it comes from.
Small wild onions come up across the open prairie in spring. They are excellent, and they grow in the same ground as death camas, which kills people and livestock. The smell is the whole test.
Speak with someone who knows this plant before you harvest it.
Take care
- Death camas grows alongside wild onion and kills. Smell every bulb. No onion smell means put it down and wash your hands.
- Never gather onions once the tops have dried off and you can no longer identify the plant.
What it is confused with
Deadly look-alikeDeath camas Anticlea elegans and Toxicoscordion venenosum
Death camas has the same grass-like leaves and the same onion-like bulb in the same prairie, and NO onion smell at all. That is the only test you need, and it is the only test there is. Smell every single bulb, every time, no matter how sure you are of the patch.
How to know it
- Smell
- Crush a leaf or scratch the bulb. Onion. Strong, obvious, unmistakable. If there is no onion smell, it is not an onion, and you should assume it is death camas.
- Leaves
- Narrow, grass-like, rising from the base.
- Flowers
- A rounded cluster of small white to pink flowers at the top of a leafless stalk.
- Bulb
- A small onion bulb, often in a fibrous or netted coat.
The country it grows in
- Open prairie
- Coulee slopes
- Aspen parkland
- Sandy and gravelly ground
Landscape types only. We do not publish where a patch is, and we are not going to.
When it is ready
- Roots May to JulyBulbs while the tops are still green enough to identify.
- Leaves April to June
Right now it is July. Something on this plant is in season.
What it is used for
- Food and drink
- Breathing and colds
Eaten raw and cooked, and used to flavour meat and stew.
How it is prepared
- Food
Raw, roasted, or cooked into whatever else is going.
Smell every bulb before it goes anywhere near your mouth.
Protocol
Ask the plant first, and offer something before you take anything. Tobacco is what is most often offered here. Say who you are, and say what the medicine is for.
Harvest the mature plants and leave the small ones to grow. Never take the first plant you find, and never take all of them.
Take only what you will actually use. Medicine picked and then left to rot in a bag was taken for nothing.
Leave the ground as you found it. Put back any dirt you dug up, and return any plant material you do not use to the earth.
Do not gather beside roads, highways or trails, where the plants take up whatever has been sprayed or spilled there.
If you are not certain what a plant is, do not pick it and do not put it in your mouth. Ask someone. Being wrong in the field is how people get hurt.
Take from a wide area rather than clearing a patch, and leave the small ones.