Sounds like elephant garlic but without a picture or better description I'm not sure.

Never heard of elephant garlic that did not have cloves, all that I have bought & grew had large cloves.
This bulb is round like pearl onions, but has flat leaves & garlic taste.
The man who gave me my start, pickles it.
The bulbs are round not wedge shaped like every other kind of garlic I have seen in the last 40 years.
I will get a photo when I dig it next fall, did not think to take photos before planting the bulbs.
I ask a garlic grower on a site & he said it sound like a Chinese garlic, but also would like a photo.
Hopefully it will multiply this coming season & I can spread the bulbs around.
That way it will not be so rare in a few years.

I just thought elephant garlic because of the bulbs around the main bulb thing you mentioned.
On second thought this link might be what you are describing.

Here is a link that might be useful: single bulb garlic

Thanks, madroneb.
This link was helpful.

Harvest my organic garlic, my single clove garlic is still green & blooming.

Here is a pic of my single clove garlic, I will not pull it until it's bottom leaves die.
{{gwi:367133}} tried to turn pic, no luck.

The garlic still green with no dry blades, i have cut back on watering to be safe.

I wish I could say that I love my single clove garlic.
The clove were planted last of 2011.
The plants have been in the ground for about 36 months.
I wanted to give the plants time to put out a lot of little cloves on the out side of the larger clove/round /bulb of single clove garlic & it did, must be twenty little garlic plants.
So I pulled the large stacks up to see how large the single cloves were.
I want to say it was a nice large single bulb, but It is NOT, in it's place is 4 large cloves, just like other garlic.
The man I got the first bulbs from, must have been digging up the small single clove that form on the outside of this garlic bulb.

I put my cloves in organic soil & mulched them, watered them when I watered my tomatoes & other veggies.
So I am not sure why he never has large stalks or cloves on his garlic.
But one of my bulbs is as big as a baseball !
This maybe common place for some of you, but I have never had garlic that big & I pamper my garlic.

Given the flower stalk, I would say that is Elephant Garlic. I have never ever had true garlic put out a flower scape, but have grown Elephant Garlic in the past and that is how it looks.

How is the taste of this "garlic?" If it is wimpy then you know for sure it is Elephant. Also, the small flat-sided (one side is flat, anyway) bulbs are something that the Elephant Garlic does as I recall.

So, no not a garlic, but rather a leek.

It is big like Elephant garlic, but It has heat for the time it is in your mouth, but dissipate as soon as you shallow the bit of garlic.
Does it take 36 months/3-summers for Elephant garlic to make large cloves from the root-bulbsils?
This is what happen here.
The man I got it from grew it in poor,dry soil & it never bloomed in 20 years.
This may be because it grew under a Catawba tree in GA.

Looks like Elephant garlic to me, too, or at least one of the leeks closely related to it, and those can take more than a single growing season to set additional cloves. For that matter there seems to be more than one strain of Elephant garlic, too. As I understand it all of the ornamental alliums are edible and often taste garlicy, with many of them blooming like in the picture.