Langbar Loop #13: Smelly Bloomers
Note: the published coordinates are not for the cache location
The 13th cache in the series is the 4th of 5 hidden by the footpath running along the edge of the farmland at the top of the steep western bank of Holden Gill.
To find the cache: click on the image above and this will link you to a jigsaw puzzle, completion of which will reveal the cache coordinates - and a helpful hint.
Please note that the cache description contains an external link above to a jigsaw.
Although it is from a well-known source, it has 'not been checked by Groundspeak nor by the reviewer for possible malicious content and access to the site is therefore at your own risk'.
At various points along the loop distinctive patches of this lovely but odorous plant were seen including down in the gill valleys.
See Langbar Loop #1 for background info on the series including a map.
Continuing from the theme of #12, one of the earliest plants to bloom in spring - and often in great profusion is the Three-Cornered Garlic (Allium triquetrum).
This bulbous flowering plant in the genus Allium (onions and garlic) is also known in English as wild garlic or three-cornered leek/onion, and in Australia and New Zealand as onion weed/grass. Both the English name and the specific epithet triquetrum refer to the 3-cornered shape of its flower stalks.
It flowers from January–May in its native environment. Its leaves have a distinct onion smell when crushed - for example when walked on.
It is native to SW Europe, NW Africa, Madeira and the Canary Islands, where it prefers damp, shady places in meadows, woodland clearings, on river banks and roadside verges from sea level up to 850m. It has also been introduced to the British Isles, New Zealand, Turkey, Australia, California, Oregon, and South America, and is a declared noxious weed in some of those places.
Its seeds are spread naturally by ants and other insects.
Uses and Traditions: the Allium genus has a major role in nutrition and garlic and its cultivation for food
use has a long history documented since 3,000 BC.
Garlic. onion, leek and related plants are widely used in cooking. All parts of A.triquetrum, from the bulb to the flowers, are edible fresh (for example in pestos) or cooked, and have a subtle flavour like leek or spring onion.
Like most Allium species, A.triquetrum contains an antibiotic allicin, which gives it hypotensive, antibiotic, disinfectant, and hypoglycaemic properties. Recent research also indicates that it has beneficial effects on cardiovascular disease.
Among other things, it is also used in many insect repellents.
In the kitchen both the bun and the small bulbs were consumed raw in the past as a salad, or used to flavor legume soups.
Knowledge of garlic including wilder forms such as the A.triquetrum, is very ancient. 5,000 years ago it was highly valued by the Egyptians who used it to buy a healthy male slave for about 7 kilos of garlic. It was included in the diet of workers building the pyramid of Cheope (2,500 BC) to increase their vigor.
Among the virtues of the Allium described in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were that it is useful for 'hunting out the body of worms wide, causing the urine, good at the bites of the vipers, it is useful to the hydrops, clarifies the voice, relieves the cough Old, laughing at lice, solves bruises, recreates hair cascading by pelagic' (Mattioli, 1544).