Allium chamaemolyL.

Dwarf garlic

WFO wfo-0000755930 Accepted WFO 2026-06 3 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–c · 2 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 2 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Allium chamaemoly, photographed by David Delon
fig. a David Delon, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-01-09 / obs. 175632488

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 14 botanical countries

Regions where Allium chamaemoly is native: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, East Aegean Is., Albania, Baleares, Corse, France, Greece, Italy, NW. Balkan Pen., Sardegna, Sicilia, Spain AlgeriaMoroccoTunisiaEast Aegean Is.AlbaniaCorseFranceGreeceItalyNW. Balkan Pen.SiciliaSpain BalearesSardegna
Native distribution of Allium chamaemoly, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Albania ALB EUROPE
Baleares BAL
Corse COR
France FRA
Greece GRC
Italy ITA
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Sardegna SAR
Sicilia SIC
Spain SPA
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Morocco MOR
Tunisia TUN
East Aegean Is. EAI ASIA-TEMPERATE

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 109 in flower of 159 examined

Proportion of examined Allium chamaemoly in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 40 45 89% 77% to 95%
Feb 45 57 79% 67% to 88%
Mar 3 22 14% 5% to 33%
Apr 0 11 0% 0% to 26%
May 0 0 too few examined
Jun 0 0 too few examined
Jul 0 0 too few examined
Aug 0 0 too few examined
Sep 0 0 too few examined
Oct 0 2 too few examined
Nov 1 2 too few examined
Dec 20 20 100% 84% to 100%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Allium chamaemoly observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 109 of 159 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 11 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Allium chamaemoly subsp. chamaemoly
  • Allium chamaemoly var. littoralis (Jord. & Fourr.) Maire & Weiller
  • Allium chamaemoly var. viridulum (Jord. & Fourr.) Maire & Weiller
  • Allium columnae Bubani
  • Nectaroscordum chamaemoly (L.) Galasso & Banfi
  • Saturnia cernua Maratti
  • Saturnia chamaemoly (L.) Salisb.
  • Saturnia etrusca Jord. & Fourr.
  • Saturnia littoralis Jord. & Fourr.
  • Saturnia rubrinervis Jord. & Fourr.
  • Saturnia viridula Jord. & Fourr.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.