WHAT TO SPOT
Natural wonders to watch out for this week…
Tick, tock. With every passing day, it seems as though another sign of spring is upon us. When a gentle breeze is blowing, the flowers of a hazel tree have a metronomic quality to them – wafting back and forth to signal the ever-lengthening days and the warmer months ahead.
Many of the botany books will tell you to expect flowering hazel catkins around mid-February. But increasingly this is poppycock. One botanist I know tells me the books tend to get winter flowering times so wrong because historically many of the authors in question could never be bothered to slip on their waterproofs and go out to properly check.
While this is an amusing theory, more likely the increasingly warm winters bought about as a result of climate change are playing their part.
Back in 2017, the Woodland Trust’s Nature’s Calendar, a citizen science project that records signs of the passing seasons, received five reports from correspondents in the South and South West that hazel catkins were already in flower in October.
While this winter is shaping up to be the coldest in several years, in many parts of the country the hazel catkins are already out and easy to spot.
Hazel trees are monoecious, which means they have both male and female flowers on the same plant. The male flowers are long and dangly and, like the flowers that will appear on silver birch trees later in the seasons, are colloquially known as “lamb’s tails”.
The female flowers can be found on small buds with red filaments sticking out as if some hapless angler has caught a fishing fly in the tree. In autumn, it is these female buds that will eventually become hazelnuts.
A hazel tree is a constant companion through the seasons. Its leaves are among the first to appear of any native species, around April, with a rounded base circling into a pointed tip. Run a finger across them and you will notice the leaves are hairy with a saw-shaped edge known as a “double tooth”.
The hazel is also among the last to hold on to its leaves, eventually shedding them late in autumn, by which time they have turned a bright yellow, not unlike the colour of its spring flowers. Perhaps it is for this early flowering and late autumnal display that, in medieval times, hazel trees were associated with fertility.
The Celts, meanwhile, correlated hazel trees – and the nuts they produce – with wisdom and poetic inspiration. There is an
ancient tale of a hazel grove overshadowing a salmon pool whose fallen nuts imbued the fish with magical powers. Supposedly, the number of spots on the salmon’s skin equated to the number of hazelnuts it had gobbled up.
The pliancy of the wood meant hazel was a much-valued tree in previous centuries – used for staffs, shepherd’s crooks and weaving, and also as an effective rod for warding off evil spirits. In making the curved handle of a shepherd’s crook, it was common to bend the branch while it was still growing and later cut it off ready for use.
Certainly this tree, common in hedgerows throughout Britain, actively responds to being cut. As a general rule, coppicing a hazel tree will prolong its life by decades – if not centuries.
For those hazel trees still around a hundred or so years from now, who knows when their so-called “spring” flowers will emerge?