Allium paradoxum (few-flowered leek)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Allium paradoxum, photographed by Екатерина Гущина — fig. a Екатерина Гущина, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-16 / obs. 198115306

Allium paradoxum, photographed by Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas — fig. b Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 194956136

Allium paradoxum, photographed by Pavel Kacl — fig. g Pavel Kacl, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 193090983

Allium paradoxum, photographed by Duarte Frade — fig. h Duarte Frade, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 192573735

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 5 botanical countries

Native distribution of Allium paradoxum, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Iran	IRN	ASIA-TEMPERATE
North Caucasus	NCS
Transcaucasus	TCS
Turkmenistan	TKM
Ukraine	UKR	EUROPE

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 187 in flower of 248 examined

81%

77%

67%

Proportion of examined Allium paradoxum in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	4	too few examined
Mar	38	47	81%	67% to 90%
Apr	129	167	77%	70% to 83%
May	20	30	67%	49% to 81%
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	0	too few examined
Nov	0	0	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Allium paradoxum 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. 187 of 248 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 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 2 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 paradoxum var. normale Stearn
Scilla paradoxa M.Bieb.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.