SPOTLIGHT ON...

ALONG with snowdrops and daffodils, catkins are regarded as a welcome sign of spring, so if you can’t get out into the country as easily as you’d like, then grow them in your garden.

The ordinary hazel isn’t for everyone, admittedly. In a tiny plot it will make a takeover bid. But the corkscrew hazel or

Harry Lauder’s walking stick, (Corylus avellana ‘Contorta’), looks fabulous at this time of year and will never eat you out of house and home.

Named after a Scottish comic, whose chief prop was a crooked walking stick, its twisted curlicues of branches will erupt every February with those delicate, sulphur yellow lambs’ tails that send clouds of pollen into the air when gently tapped.

These are the male flowers. Look very closely and you’ll see other buds on the stems are carrying the female flowers – they are much smaller and comprise a tuft of bright crimson filaments that will sometimes carry hazelnuts in the autumn.

But it is for the jollity of its flowers that we grow it, and the contorted beauty of its twisted stems. The leaves themselves are coarse, hairy and rather puckered, but they are a small price to pay for a plant that’s good to look at for the other six months of the year.

It is not especially fast growing or too large and the back of a border is a good place for it. Then you will notice it in winter when its catkins unfurl. If you have a shady wall and are struggling to find something to cover it, you could plump for another plant that carries catkins – Garrya elliptica. This is an evergreen shrub, happiest against a wall, and its dark green leaves make a good background to the grey–green catkins that dangle from the shoot tips in February and March. In the variety ‘James Roof’ these catkins can be anything up to 12in long.