Suppliers are being increasingly adventurous with garlic varieties and we have put together a list to help you choose your stock for this season. If you are a supplier of garlic seedstock or know of a supply that might interest other growers please contact us with details. Most of the suppliers listed below took part in the RHS garlic trials and should have the varieties listed available for dispatch as the season dictates.

Confused about varieties? Here's a quick refresher . . . . .

Garlic, Allium sativum L., is a member of a very large genus (over 500 species) of cultivated plants which includes onions, leeks, shallots and chives as well as other wild and ornamental species. The cultivated forms of garlic are thought to have descended from the wild species A. longicuspis, A. tuncelianum and perhaps A. macrochaetum and to have originated in the mountainous regions of Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan - typically arid areas with minimal rainfall and long, hot days. Wild Allium species still found in the region are weakly competitive, typically growing as patches of small populations on rocky, open sites and having long growing periods, taking between three and ten years to reach maturity.

Early travellers to the region were introduced to the remarkable curative, antiseptic and culinary properties of wild garlic and as they took bulbs with them on their journeys, so the plant became more widely distributed and cultivated outside of its native region. Over the past ten thousand years garlic has been subjected to intense domestic selection under a wide range of growing conditions and this has led to the creation of many hundreds, if not thousands, of clones.

There have been many attempts at classification but today it is widely accepted that cultivated garlic divides into four distinct groups - the ophioscorodon group in the cooler, wetter conditions of northern Europe, the sativum group in the warm, fertile areas of the Mediterranean and the sub-tropical and pekinese groups of the Indian sub-continent and China respectively.

Horticulturally we recognise only two distinct groups - ophioscorodon (Allium sativum var. ophioscorodon) - often referred to as hardneck or topsetting garlic due to the fact that it produces a flower stalk, and the sativum or softneck garlics (Allium sativum var. sativum) which generally do not produce flower stalks. The wild longicuspis and more primitive varieties are typically included with the hardneck group as Purple Stripe and Porcelain varieties while the softneck group encompasses the pekinese and sub-tropical clones within its wide classification as Asiatics.