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It is native to Central Asia, possibly from Kyrgyzstan (southeastern Siberia), from where it spread widely throughout Europe.
Today garlic is grown in large scale more or less everywhere in the world.
It has lost its ability to reproduce sexually, replacing it by propagating vegetatively.
Garlic has great symbolism and different meanings around the world.
According to Pliny the Elder, garlic scares snakes and craziness away and averts bad luck; that is why it is hanged on farmers’ gateways.
In addition, it protects from evil eye and, according to tradition, garlic has a good reputation to keep vampires and the devil away.
Its characteristic smell is due to sulfoxides.
When the bulb is crushed or cut, alliina (odorless) hydrolyzes due to alliinasa and produces allicin (responsible for the smell), which is quickly transformed into allyl disulfide.
Morphologically, it is a bulbous herbaceous and perennial geophyte.
Its stem is erect, rigid, fistular.
The leaves are linear, flat, elongated, acute and glabrous.
The inflorescence is an umbelliform cyme surrounded by a large foliar structure called spathe which falls during flowering.
Flowers are small, hermaphrodite, with a white, pink or violet perianth made up of 6 tepals, with 6 oposite-petalled stamens and a 3-carpellate gynoecium.
Bulbils are produced in the inflorescences.
The part used as a drug is its bulb.
It has good medicinal properties as hypolipidemic agent: it lowers LDL cholesterol in blood
it is a peripheral vasodilator and antihypertensive, antiplatelet
hypoglycemiant, antibiotic and general antiseptic, it is also anticarcinogenic, vermifuge, tonic and purifying.
It is a good stimulant of the defenses increasing activity of body cells, lymphocytes and macrophages, stimulates the immune response and helps the body immune system to resist infections.
It is recently considered to be useful as a complement in the treatment of AIDS.
It is also a detoxifying agent, specially for smoking cessation.
From a culinary point of view, it is an excellent vegetable in Mediterranean cuisine.