Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The plants are propagated vegetatively or from seed, the latter being more
important for the commercial crop. Most seed is produced by open pollination
of selected plants. The utilization of male sterility has enabled large-leaved F
1
hybrids to be bred, which are high yielding as 'forced' winter greenhouse crops
in Germany.
Chinese chives,
Allium tuberosum
Rottl.
Allium tuberosum
grows wild over much of eastern Asia, from Mongolia in the
north to the Philippines in the south, and from Japan to Thailand east-west. It
is a plant that easily naturalizes from cultivation, so its initial centre of origin is
unclear. Chinese chives have been cultivated for more than 3000 years in
China (Debin
et al.
, 2005). The plant is cultivated for its edible, garlic-flavoured
leaves, young inflorescences and, in some varieties, fleshy roots. In China the
shoots are often harvested after being blanched by excluding light. During
dormancy it stores its reserves in rhizomes that are covered in a brown, fibrous
coating formed from the remains of old foliage leaf bases. The leaves, which
arise as dense clumps from the rhizome, are flat, grass-like and keeled and the
scape is solid and sharp-angled (see Fig. 1.1), bearing a flat-topped umbel of
white, open, star-shaped, fragrant flowers (see Plate 1). The plant is often
grown as a decorative for its attractive inflorescence. It can be propagated both
vegetatively and from seed, which is formed in abundance.
French grey shallot,
Allium oschaninii
In southern and eastern France, and also in Argentina, the grey shallot cultivar
'Grise de la Drome' is cultivated for its esteemed bulbs of unique flavour
(Messiaen
et al.
, 1993). The bulbs are covered with several skins that adhere
together to form a grey-coloured 'shell'. The leaves are light green and the roots
are thick and do not die back during bulbing. Molecular and chromosome
techniques (RAPD and GISH) have shown that the grey shallot is a domesticate
of
A. oschaninii
. Most of the chromosomes are from
A. oschaninii
and 1.5
chromosomes are derived from either
A. cepa
or
A. vavilovii
(Friesen and Klaas,
1998). These studies showed that
A. oschaninii
, which is in
Allium
subgenus
Cepa
section
Cepa
, is a sister group to the
A. cepa/A. vavilovii
evolutionary line.
Allium oschaninii
occurs in the wild in central to south-western Asia, and and its
large bulbs are collected for food by local inhabitants. A homogeneous strain
from 'Grise de la Drome' has been selected, subjected to meristem tip culture to
remove viruses and propagated in insect-proof houses and released as improved
selection 'Giselle' by the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique
(INRA), France (Rabinowitch and Kamenetsky, 2002).
