Allium fistulosumL.

welsh onion

WFO wfo-0000756246 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 7 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 7 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 fistulosum, photographed by John Flower
fig. a John Flower, CC BY 4.0 / 2017-12-30 / obs. 12610974

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
03763131
Filed as
Allium fistulosum L.
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
not recorded
Origin
not recorded
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 2 botanical countries

Regions where Allium fistulosum is native: China North-Central, China South-Central China North-CentralChina South-Central
Native distribution of Allium fistulosum, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
China North-Central CHN ASIA-TEMPERATE
China South-Central CHC

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 134 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -29.2 °C -9.0 °C 20.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 18.1 °C 24.3 °C 31.5 °C
Annual rainfall 242 mm 676 mm 2,180 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 10 mm 90 mm 319 mm

It is found where winters are arctic. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 134 research-grade observations of Allium fistulosum that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

Also published as 23 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 bouddae Debeaux
  • Allium fistulosum var. caespitosum Makino
  • Allium fistulosum var. giganteum Makino
  • Allium globosum M.Bieb.
  • Allium kashgaricum Prokh.
  • Allium moly Griseb. & Schur ex Regel
  • Allium moschatum Sint. ex Regel
  • Allium ochroleucum Rchb.
  • Allium paniculatum Ker Gawl.
  • Allium rupestre Fisch. ex Schrank
  • Allium savranicum Besser
  • Allium saxatile Pall.
  • Allium stevenii Willd. ex Ledeb.
  • Allium tauricum (Besser ex Rchb.) Grossh.
  • Allium tauricum Pall. ex G.Don
  • Allium tenuifolium Schur
  • Cepa fissilis Garsault
  • Cepa fistulosa (L.) Gray
  • Cepa ventricosa Moench
  • Kepa fistulosa (L.) Raf.
  • Phyllodolon fistulosum (L.) Salisb.
  • Porrum fistulosum (L.) Schur
  • Schoenissa caucasea Salisb.

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.