Description
(tenuifolium subsp. galianii)
Biarum galianii was first published in 1976 by Lozano Salvador Talavera in Lagascalia 6: 289 (1976). (Revisión de las especies españolas del género Biarum Schott). It is a native of a very small area of s.w. Spain and adjacent Portugal where it is found, perhaps exclusively, on loose sandy soils rather than the terra rossa or more compacted clay soils, favoured in this general area by other Biarum species. Peter Boyce in his 2008 revision of the genus treats it as a subspecies of B. tenuifolium, others regard it as a full species or a relative of B. arundanum.
The foliage is a close-packed, very upright basal rosette and it is characterised by its very slender, linear leaves which are produced in a tight cluster. In the plants that we grow, all of the leaves are surrounded by a reddish bract both on emergence and for some weeks after, something I have not observed in any other Biarum species. The leaf rosettes form in autumn and persist throughout the winter and through spring until the early summer when rising temperatures cause them to senesce and die. Flowering follows dormancy from late May, June or July, or it can be delayed (or repeated?) in early Autumn.
The spathe is deep purple-black and the “flower” has the usual, short-lived pungency of related species. It can however be differentiated by the staminodes which are said to be 2 – 3-branched (in practice this is not a totally dependable factor and it seems to apply to the lowermost of the lower staminodes only). A more reliable feature is that the staminodes are arranged into 7 irregular whorls rather than the 8 of the related tenuifolium. Again we do not find this is always a clear-cut or well defined character, as the whorls in both taxa are rarely well enough differentiated or regularly arranged to enable a fully accurate counting. The variability of these characters are all illustrated in the original description. It seems that a combination of the factors mentioned with the very characteristic slender foliage and its wild preference for sandy soils contribute to the best botanical diagnosis. In practice however the two species look very different to each other, could never be mistaken for each other and are easily separated on appearance alone!
Now that I have become more familiar with this species I find it one of the more fascinating, in its own, very perverse way. “Flowering” for want of a better word, starts with the emergence of a slender, brown-purple, hooped, whip-like growth and nothing else. This gradually elongates more and more (the longest I have seen in the genus) and finally reveals itself as the spadix. With a little more age the apparent little flap at the top, gradually peels itself down and unfurls, revealing itself to be the spathe which is purple-brown with a green apex, the colour of which gradually blends into the brown. Throw in a little more age and the green part of the spathe suddenly reflexes itself back making it look as if the spathe is all purple, until you manually un-flip it! I have tried to show the progression in the gallery pictures which incidentally represent not just the same species but the same actual tubers in the same season (May-June 2024). It is hard to believe that this is the same species, let alone the very same tubers.
Cultivation is as standard as for the other related species and we find increase to be pleasingly good, by the production of small offsets. Seed spikes, when set, are white on emergence.
Added to our lists May 2023
