NUTS ABOUT HAZEL

IT’S the time of year for me to share one of my favourite things in nature (and there’s a lot to choose from).

Drum roll, please. It is... the little red flower of the hazel tree.

It is absolutely beautiful, yet littleknown, and it is the bit that produces the hazelnut later on, so is not only beautiful but productive too.

We are all familiar with the showy male catkins strutting their stuff and waggling in the wind, crediting them with heralding spring and giving them cute names like Lamb’s Tails.

Each catkin is actually made up of lots of individual flowers which are the small green/ yellow male flowers that produce the pollen.

There are around 250 male flowers in each catkin and they form during the previous summer so that they are ready to open in winter and then flower through the spring.

We tend to associate catkins with the hazel, but a catkin or ‘ament’ is just a slim, cylindrical flower cluster or spike, with the flower ‘petals’ being inconspicuous or even non-existent.

Other trees that host catkins include alder, silver birch, goat willow – also known as pussy willow, where the catkins looking like cat’s paws – walnut, sweet chestnut and even the mighty oaks.

You can find out more at www. treeguideuk.co.uk/mini-guides/catkins/

If you think that a catkin being a flower without petals is confusing, it gets more challenging.

Each female flower of the hazel isn’t actually a flower but two red styles, which are the pollen receiving part of a flower.

While each bud contains a cluster of between four and 14 female flowers, only the styles emerge from the bud so are the bits that are seen and look like little petals.

Thankfully you don’t need to know, or remember, all this information in order to appreciate the wonder of the little red ‘flowers’.

It’s far more important that you know they exist and are able to find them.

It takes a while but is well worth persevering.

Hazels typically begin flowering in January and will go on into April, although I have seen open flowers in December, and February seems the easiest time to spot them.

Once pollinated in the springtime, the female flowers set to work producing the hazelnuts, which will ripen in the autumn.