If you're not yet familiar with the history of garlic and with the sometimes dramatic differences in flavor and growing characteristics between garlic cultivars, we highly recommend taking a few moments to educate yourself. There are basically ten distinct horticultural groups, or sub-species, of garlic. Knowing a bit about this diversity can help in choosing which cultivars you'd like to try next. Botanists have used genetic information to roughly determine which garlic groups are oldest and which are more recent. If we compare garlic to human evolution, it would appear something like what we've created in the depiction you see at right.