Nodding Wild Onion Project

After eight years of trying, it appears that I’m finally learning how to raise captive Nodding Wild Onions, Allium cernuum.  It’s a good thing too, because the last of the wild plants disappeared from Blue Jay Barrens three years ago.  The onions in this pot represent the offspring of six plants taken from the wild and relocated into my prairie garden.  That left only a dozen plants growing in their original location, a site that was too shady for the plants to produce flowers.  You can read about the original relocation by clicking HERE.

The plants in this pot appear to be doing their best to break through the chicken wire barrier and reclaim their positions as wild plants.  There are more onion flowers this year than I’ve had in total over the last seven years.

This spring, I took a few young plants from the pot and relocated them to one of the native plant beds in my vegetable garden.  All of those plants have grown wonderfully.  They are currently sharing the bed with Spider Milkweed, Leavenworthia uniflora, and Draba cuneifolia.  I think the species in that mix should work well together.

Nodding Wild Onions produce lovely blooms that attract a wide variety of insects.  Here we have a beetle, a fly and a bunch of ants.

The most common pollinators this year are small green Sweat Bees.

Butterflies are not frequent visitors of the onion flowers, but there are sometimes exceptions.  This Olive Hairstreak spent close to five minutes exploring the onion flowers.  The Olive Hairstreak spring brood was quite successful this year.  The second brood is now coming on more strongly than I have seen in many years.

Early onion flowers are already producing seed pods.  I should have ample seed to increase my captive population of plants, as well as scatter some seed out into suitable wild sites.  It’s taken longer than I had originally thought, but I’m now becoming optimistic that this project could be successful.

Nodding Wild Onion

This Nodding Wild Onion, Allium cernuum, hasn’t been incarcerated because of bad behavior; it’s simply being held in protective custody. It seems that there are any number of creatures ready to make a meal of this plant and I have reasons for wanting it left alone. It’s not considered a rare plant, but the six plants in this pen represent one-third of the entire Blue Jay Barrens population.

Nodding Wild Onion is associated with prairies and sunny, open spaces. About eight years ago I found 18 plants growing in this heavily shaded area. I figured that seeds had washed down from the prairies on top of the hill. I spent four years watching these plants and searching for other plants growing in more suitable areas. I found no others and discovered that those growing in the shade were not producing flowers. One of my goals is to increase the populations of endangered and threatened species at Blue Jay Barrens, but I am also trying to increase the numbers of normally common native species that exhibit low population numbers.

One of my management rules forbids the introduction of plants or seeds from any source other than this property. That means that the only way I could increase the number of Nodding Wild Onions was to get those 18 plants to start reproducing. It was impractical to cut all the big trees in order to bring light to the plants, so I dug six plants and moved them to my prairie garden in front of the house.

The onions weren’t caged at first. The first year in the garden, all of the plants developed large flower heads and I was congratulating myself on the success of my efforts. Then, the flowers and half the plant leaves were eaten. The second year, I put a chicken wire cage around the plants and one day found the cage knocked over and the plants eaten into the ground. I replaced the chicken wire cage with a more substantial cage and found several weeks later that a mole had tunneled beneath all the plants, leaving them dry and withered. Success seemed to be slipping farther away.

This year, year number three, has the plants protected by an even stronger cage with vertical wires that project about six inches into the soil. I’m not even thinking about getting flowers, I just hope the plants can grow unmolested for the entire season. Well, at least the plants are still there and that means I still have a chance of success.