Tree Flowers: January 2016: Hazel

When I was growing up, I had a sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) growing right outside my window. I enjoyed when the tree developed the winged seeds, and less enjoyed having the task of pruning it each year (someone in the past had pollarded it, which I always thinks looks horrible and a sign of a badly placed tree). But I never noticed the flowers - even though they would have been no more than 6 feet from my bedroom window.

So, to try to make up for my unobservant past, this year I'm going to be looking at a different tree flower each month. Some will be native to the UK, but I'll be looking at all sorts of trees from wild to neatly kept, from showy to discrete. In some ways, the smaller and less 'flower' like the better. I'll try to feature trees that are in flower that month, or hopefully within the correct season.

I'll start this series of posts with hazel:

Hazel quickly followed the birches in establishing themselves and recolonising Britain after the last ice age. However, they cannot tolerate deep shade and cannot grow tall enough to reach the light (growing up to a maximum of 30 feet), therefore they are likely to be one of the first species you see on the edge of deciduous woodland.

The flowers of Hazel are incomplete, to make up for that, the tree is monoecious, so it has both the male and female flower on the same plant. This differs from plants such as holly where the male flowers are on one individual and the female flowers on a different individual.

The flowers are wind pollinated and without petals. The tiny female flower is enclosed in a series of bracts (photo above) and shows only the stigmas, which are reddish. The male flowers are a bit more obvious as they are catkins, sometimes quite bulky, which dangle down and move in the wind.

They are often multi-stemmed and has been well used in cultivation for coppicing. They grow quickly with reasonably straight branches that are often used as poles - particularly often for growing peas and beans. Other uses of hazel include being employed as a 'nurse' species for more commercially valuable species such as walnuts (my breakfast) and cherry. This is due to the strong early growth of hazel, which provides shelter and shade for the main crop - the shade reducing the growth of brambles and other 'weed' species.

Quick to develop roots, layering in the winter is a common way to propagate new plants - however these will be clones and won't increase the gene pool. While, hazel doesn't have many pests and diseases, the ones it does have seem to concentrate on foliage (deer and livestock) and nuts (grey squirrels).

I was surprised to see the female flowers out in January (and most already at an end) - as winter hasn't really happened yet. But this allowed me to use hazel as my first tree flower in this series. I hope you enjoyed it and go out to find some!

References:

Mabey, Richard. Flora Britannica. 1st edition. London: Chatto & Windus / Sinclair Stevenson, 1996.

Coombes, Allen J., and Zsolt Debreczy. The Book of Leaves: A Leaf-by-Leaf Guide to Six Hundred of the World’s Great Trees. S.l.: Ivy Pre

Hemery, Gabriel, and Sarah Simblet. The New Sylva: A Discourse of Forest and Orchard Trees for the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. ss, 2015.