Protected flower! It is illegal to collect the bulbs.

Mainly found growing wild in Central and Southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean as far as Turkey.

All species of Galanthus are perennial, herbaceous plants which grow from bulbs. Each bulb generally produces just two or three linear leaves and an erect, leafless flowering stem, which bears at the top a pair of bract-like valves joined by a papery membrane. From between them emerges a solitary, pendulous, bell-shaped white flower, held on a slender pedicel (flower stalk). The flower has no true petals: it consists of six tepals (petal-like flower parts), the outer three being larger and more convex than the inner series.

The ovary is three-celled, ripening into a three-celled capsule. Each whitish seed has a small, fleshy tail (elaiosome) containing substances attractive to ants which distribute the seeds. The leaves die back a few weeks after the flowers have faded.

(Source: Wikipedia)

The Latin name and common name in German is due to the brown bear's taste for the bulbs and its habit of digging up the ground to get at them; they are also a favourite of wild boar in the Lobau.

In Europe, where wild garlic leaves are popularly harvested from the wild, similarity to poisonous plants regularly leads to cases of poisoning. Apart from the distinctive garlic smell when the leaves are crushed, the main distinctive feature of the leaves that should avoid the danger of confusion is that each leaf has a separate stem arising directly from the ground. See !L! button below for photo. (In Lily of the valley, a highly poisonous plant with similar-shaped leaves, the leaves unroll successively from a single central stem.) (Beware of trusting the smell of the leaves when crushed – once your hands have got the smell, everything you touch will seem to have the garlic smell!)

(Source: Wikipedia)

This is a perennial plant producing a small bulb at the base of the stem, rarely more than 1.5cm across.

Leaves are long, narrow and grass-like, not easily distinguishable amongst meadow grass. Flower-bearing stems are tall and erect carrying at the tip a large, purple inflorescence of small, bell-like, flowers, each with 6 tepals. Flowers are carried on long slender stalks, some upright and some drooping. The stamens are long and project beyond the tepals. In amongst the flowers are small greenish bulbils that drop and scatter when mature and can grow to produce genetically identical clones of the parent plant (as oppose to slightly varied offspring typically growing from seeds).

This is a bulbous perennial plant that reproduces mainly through small bulbils or bulblets carried together with pale, almost colourless flowers in a dense cluster at the tip of a single, tall stem. The cluster is enclosed in 2 large bracts (a spathe) as it develops and these persist during flowering, visible as dry scaly leaf-like structures extending outwards at the base of the inflorescence.

The flowers are pale and vary in number, the long, slender stalks are of differing lengths.

The sand leek is a perennial plant growing from an egg-shaped bulb. The flowering stem is tall, erect, the upper half leafless and with a globular cluster of mixed flowers and bulbils at the tip. Bulbils are visible as dark purple, pointed, bulb-like structures nestling between the flowers.

Two long, dry, leaf-like bracts may be visible at the base of the cluster. These are the remains of the sheath or spathe that protects the cluster in the bud stage.

Each flower has a short stalk, stamens and pistil visibly projecting from the mouth of the flower ‘bell’. Fruits are capsules but the seeds seldom set. Propagation usually occurs when bulbils are knocked off the cluster, growing into genetically identical new plants ( vegetative reproduction).