Onions as a decoration?

Have you ever thought of onions as a decoration? Up to this week, I did not even know how the flowers of onions look like.  And sure, tulips have an onion, too. This onions are called giant onions – allium giganteum　ギガンジュームアリアム. Their onions are actually eatable and sometimes used for medicine, too.

At this point some basic introductions: this purple inflorescence (flower head which is actually many small flowers) is made of hundreds of little purple flowers. All in all it has a diameter of  nearly ten centimeters – so it is quite big, e.g. gigantic. As they are attached to leave-less stems, they make quite a nice decoration.  So onions make quite an impressive decoration.

Many students of the Smith`s school of Englishスミス英会話 here in Fuse, Higashi Osaka 東大阪布施 have thought the same and asked about the rather unknown allium giganteum ギガンジュームアリアム.  Even English students　英会話生徒 that know quite a lot about flowers and plants were quite curious about this one, as it apparently is not well known in Japan. As so often, the flowers proved to be a natural introduction to start basic conversation smoothly.

Because of this, many of the English students 英会話生徒　used the chance to repeat some basic introductions, a conversation topic often used in the very first lessons with a new English Conversation student but then either repeated to often (always when a new student joins the class) or never again. For example, basic questions like: “What is your name?” or “Where are you from?”, know to English students all around the world, can easily be changed to “What is it`s name?” and Where is it from?” Equipped with these basic questions, even a beginner in English Conversation can actually start a conversation about a topic like these giant onions, and some natural conversation can develop from there.

As for the allium giganteum　ギガンジュームアリアム, this has been especially true. Their obvious beauty while not been known has made many of the English Conversation students 英会話生徒 very curious about the plant, and we had some nice discussions developing .

If you also got curious about onions, try the wikipedia page on allium:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allium

In Japanese, they are called ネギ属, but the page is not very detailed at this point.