Hazel

Sitting at my dining table, I’m taken a little by surprise.. Oh my gosh, just look at the hazel tree, those catkins, so majestic! Yep, I’ve noticed them before, but maybe because of the position of the tree or that it has a holly behind to give the catkins a foil. Or that I’m more of a hippie than I give myself credit for. This time I really SAW it.

But what do those catkins do? I’m glad you asked!

It’s all about sex baby! Well sort of.. Catkins are flowers and flowers use many methods of reproduction. Often these require the flower to attract insects to it in order to move the male pollen to the female part of the flower, and therefore have characteristics such as more obvious petals, scents and of course nectar. 

Hazels (Corylus avellana) and for that matter other trees, such as, oak, beech and birch don’t require insects for pollination neither do any grasses. All of these plants use the wind for that. This is what gives us hayfever and why we can get it early in the year when the trees like hazel start releasing their pollen. 

Hazels are monoecious, meaning that the tree has separate male and female flowers on it. The catkins that you see hanging on the tree are male and start off shorter and brownish but mature into long yellow / gold catkins or to use their scientific name aments. The female flowers are small and inconspicuous but close up are red and quite striking, they sit above the catkin where it attaches to the branch. The catkins release their pollen before the female flowers of the same tree become receptive, this being one of the ways that stops self pollination and leads to greater genetic diversity.

Of course hazel has been used for thousands of years in Britain as a building material, it being one of the first trees to populate Britain after the ice age, following closely behind birch. When the country was mostly covered in wildwood it would have been marginalised to more open areas such as cliffs and river banks, but became more widespread again once the early settlers opened out the woodland for hunting, growing and grazing. The split sticks of hazel (wattle) being used for hurdle fences and wattle and daube amongst many other things.

The sticks or rods of one tree may well be completely different to work with than another, some twisting and bending better or splitting straighter than others and will remain consistent year after year from the same tree. For one that’s seasoned at this type of work there is a good chance that they will be able to predict the quality of the hazel rods for their intended purpose just by looking at the colour and texture of the bark.

The nuts were of course a great food resource also for those early settlers and all to follow. Richard Maybe in his Flora Botanica tells us of a 17th century quote by John Aubrey, he speaks of the great hazel woods of Wiltshire: “Wee have two sorts of them. In the south part, and particularly Cranbourne Chase, the hazells are white and tough; with which there are made the best hurdles of England. The nutts of the chase are of great note, and are sold yearly beyond sea. They sell them at Woodbery Hill Faire &c; and the price of them is the price of a buschell of wheate. The hazell-trees in north Wilts are red, and not so tough, more brittle. - Aubrey 1685.

Ecologically speaking, hazels support a bunch of insects, including the caterpillars of the brown hairstreak and comma butterflies, and an incredible 85 larger-moths, of which, species such as the nut-tree tussock (Colocasia coryli) and buff-tip moth (Phalera bucephala) rely heavily on hazel and are in decline; 41 micro-moths, 43 beetles, 42 true-bugs (those that pierce and suck fluids from plants and animals..nice!) 10 sawflies and 6 flies. Hazel is one of the earliest sources of pollen for many bees including honey, bumble and solitary and also hoverflies. 

Not to mention all the other creatures such as mammals and birds that use or even rely on hazel for food, shelter and breeding sites, including the hazel doormouse (Muscardinus avellanarius) listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List for Britain.

But as if we hadn’t already established that hazel’s weren’t interesting and important enough..

If you haven’t seen fairies yet then look no further! Bridget Boland in her book Gardener’s Magic and other Old Wives’ Lore gives us the recipe for a concoction that will do the trick: ‘The power to see fairies is difficult to acquire. They are not at the bottom of every garden. Wild thyme must first be picked ‘on the side of a hill where fairies use to be’. The word is ‘use’ note well, not ‘used’, so make sure the tradition of their presence is a living one. The injunction comes from a recipe of 1660, which recommends that you take ‘a pint of sallet oyle and put it into a vial glasse; first wash it with rose water and marygolde; the flowers to be gathered towards the east. Wash it until the oyle becomes white, then put into the glasse, then put thereto the budds of holly hockes, flower of marygolde, the flowers on tops of the wild thyme, the buds of young hazels. Then take the grasse of a fairy throne (ant hill), then all these put into the oyle in the glasse and sett it to dissolve three days in the sunne and then keep it for the use’.

I’ll leave it there I think..

Image: Trees for Cities