Some Garlic History

Among horticultural crops, garlic has one of the longest and most-venerated histories. Cultures in Europe, Egypt, and India referred to the stinking rose as long as five thousand years ago; the Babylonians used it 4500 years ago, and the Chinese documented its use as much as 4000 years ago. Early documentation refers to its medicinal properties, although monks in India avoided garlic, considering it a stimulant that aroused the passions.

Wild garlic, of the true garlic species Allium sativum, is found only in the republics of central Asia, with long, cold winters and short, hot, and dry summers. Throughout history, this area region has sat at the crossroads of trade routes, so that migrants and travelers have collected the wild garlic and carried it far and wide throughout the eastern hemisphere, so that it appears in mythologies in Egypt and creation stories in Korea.

Like many other members of the onion family, garlic uses its native short season of suitable growing conditions in the spring to collect water and grow through a vegetative cycle before developing a dry outer skin and going dormant. The dry outer layer provides a barrier against moisture loss as the bulb sits just under the surface of the soil, waiting for the following spring’s warmth, when it uses its reserves of moisture to reproduce. Because it uses day length as a cue for when to turn to drying, garlic matures in the middle of the summer even in the Upper Midwest, despite plenty of heat and moisture to come.

Wild garlic produces true seed, but cultivated garlic seems only to have been propagated asexually through bulb reproduction; each clove of garlic has the potential to become a new bulb, enlarging and then dividing over the course of the growing season. Within the past twenty years, USDA researchers have used environmental manipulation to pioneer the production of true garlic seed that results from sexual reproduction, allowing for the potential of recombining genes through traditional plant breeding techniques to create new varieties.