Foraging For Wild Onions

Names, histories, and habitat information for naturally-occurring edible alliums.

Years ago, I was on a week-long canoe trip through the Quetico Wilderness in Ontario, Canada. We subsisted on packable dried foods and whatever fish we caught. At our last campsite before returning to civilization, one of us went into the woods to scrounge firewood and returned with a large yellow onion.

He held up that onion in the middle of the campsite and yelled, “Look what I found!” For a few seconds, we stared at it, then burst into cheers. The only thing better than the onion would have been finding a twelve-pack of cold beer. Later in the evening, we diced up that onion and added it to our last fish boil of the trip. 

Life is so much better with onions in it, especially wild onions.

Names Of Wild Onions Across North America

Although onions were thought to be domesticated in the Middle East around 5,000 years ago, North America is home to many kinds of wild onions, or alliums. It’s one of the most common and widespread wild foods on the continent. Foragers from Minnesota to Louisiana and California to Maine can find and collect them in a variety of habitats. Wherever you live on this continent, you should be able to track down and forage wild onions.

Our wild alliums go by many names: wild onion, wild garlic, nodding onion, field onion, meadow garlic, and wild shallots, to name just a few. Many local regions have colloquial names for their wild alliums as well, like bear’s garlic, ransom, and wood leek. At times, the sheer number of species and names can get pretty confusing.

Indigenous peoples have their own names for alliums. The Ojibwe, who live in northern Wisconsin where I forage, call onions zhigaagawanzhiig. The word refers to all alliums in their territory, including Allium canadense and Allium triccocum, better known as ramps. Both grow in Ojibwe country and are widely used as food and medicine.

The Ever-Popular Ramp

Ramps (A. triccocum) are hands-down the most popular plant of the wild allium family. Foragers prefer them because they’re plentiful in the eastern part of the country, delicious, and easy to locate and identify.Indigenous peoples in the eastern and central U.S. have harvested them for thousands of years. In southern Appalachia, dozens of communities hold annual ramp festivals in the spring.

Ramps, in recent years, have also been deemed hip and trendy.  Unfortunately, this has led to concerns about overharvesting, which should be a consideration for every wild plant we harvest.

Although ramps seem to get all the allium attention and press, there are over 100 other varieties of wild onions and garlics to seek out in the backcountry. Most of these varieties are not well known, many are local and limited to particular and isolated habitats. They grow in just about every habitat, including meadows, forests, streamsides, mountainsides, prairies, and deserts. That’s good news if you live where ramps don’t grow and you’d like to add some of these wild foods to your diet.

Cultivated Alliums

The allium family also includes some of our favorite cultivated species—garlic, onions, leeks, chives, and shallots. According to the National Onion Association, onions were one of the first foods to be cultivated. A few of these varieties have also escaped and grow wild, like garlic (A. sativum), which you might find growing around an old farmstead or a cabin in the mountains. Although they grow wild in parts of the country, chives (A. schoenoprasum) can also be escapees. If chives are growing in a backcountry or wilderness area, they might be a wild population.

Wild Alliums

Wild alliums are perennials that grow from bulbs, typically in early spring. Their brilliant green can be obvious against a backdrop of late winter’s grays and browns. Their leaves are often hollow and needle-shaped, much like garden chives. They can also be flat like ramp leaves. 

All alliums are edible, and smell and taste like onions or garlic, so use your nose to identify this plant. Alliums can look like several other toxic plants, such as lily-of-the-valley and death camas, which will kill livestock, particularly sheep, who eat it in spring as it greens. Thankfully, these toxic plants do not have an oniony or garlicky taste or smell, making them easier to identify and avoid.

Each spring I look forward to the alliums greening up around our home just after the snow melts. One of my favorite days is uncovering our garlic beds some time in April, when we rake off the thick beds of mulched maple leaves. Each day, I also check the progress of our chives or the half a dozen clumps of ramps growing behind our house. These clumps are harbingers of the day when I will set forth to gather ramps in the surrounding maple woods, a place I have traditionally harvested them down through the years.

This year, however, I plan to seek out other wild alliums growing in my northwestern Wisconsin neighborhood. I’m unfamiliar with, actually, completely ignorant of, wild alliums outside of ramps. 

Midwestern Alliums

The Vegetation of Wisconsin, which claims, besides ramps, there are three other alliums in the state: Allium stellatum, the prairie onion, which grows in dry, rocky and sunny prairies; A. cernuum, the nodding onion, whose flowers hang downward and also grows in dry sunny habitats; and A. canadense, the Canadian onion, which thrives in wetter environments, like marshes and meadows.

According to Euell Gibbons, in his delightful book, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, A. canadense is commonly named meadow garlic, wild garlic, or wild shallot and ranges from New Brunswick down to Florida and west to the Great Plains. “Look for it in rich, low meadows,” he wrote. “It is often abundant.” Most of the prairie land is in southern Wisconsin. I live in the north, so I’ll scout for rich, low meadows and clumps of A. canadense. 

Now, where have I seen low marshy places while rambling around grouse hunting?

Other North American Wild Alliums

There are five other varieties of A. canadense, most of them growing in the central part of the country. The variety hyacinthoides grows in southern Oklahoma and northern Texas, while ecristatum lives on the coastal plain of Texas. Lavandulare ranges from Arkansas to South Dakota.

Allium canadense, with its pink or lavender flowers, is also cultivated as a garden herb and an ornamental.

Renowned forager and chef Hank Shaw says his favorite allium is the dusky onion, A. campanulatum, growing in the mountains from California north into Canada. “Your nose is your best tool when trying to figure out if that grassy shoot you are looking at is an onion,” he writes. “Anything that looks like an onion that also smells like an onion is an onion. Lots of bulbs, some of them poisonous, can look like an onion, but none will also smell like one, too.”

Eating Wild Onions

You can use your wild alliums just about any way you would use cultivated onions and garlic. Add them to omelets, pizza, or venison meatloaf. Hank Shaw suggests dehydrating them and grinding them up for your own garlic or onion powder.

Kimchi is another option if you enjoy fermented food. Several years ago, we made kimchi out of ramps, but our batch was so strong, it popped the lids off the jars. When we walked in the house, the sharp tang of kimchi greeted us and we knew immediately what had happened. That was the strongest kimchi I’ve ever eaten, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, I did wonder how we smelled to our friends and co-workers after eating a serving. I’m hoping to make more kimchi with a milder wild allium, one that doesn’t leave me reeking.

Besides their use in cooking, wild alliums also have medicinal properties. The myth that garlic warded off vampires originated in medieval Europe. Although just a myth, there is some truth grounded in it. Allicin, a chemical compound found in alliums, is a powerful antibacterial. Alliums, high in vitamin C, are also thought to guard against scurvy.

After I find the first wild alliums of the spring, I’ll probably try them first on a salad. Or maybe I will cut up the green leaves and use them in a soup—assuming I can find some. Alliums, that is.