Corylus avellana Seeds | European Hazel

European Hazel (Corylus avellana) seed — European Hazel (*Corylus avellana*): Betulaceae, the birch family; genus Corylus , sometimes separated as the family Corylaceae, native to The greater part of Europe from Britain and Iberia eastwards, through the Mediterranean hills and Anatolia to the Caucasus, with outposts in northwest Africa.

LATIN NAME: Corylus avellana

COMMON NAME: European Hazel

Plant Profile

The shrub is monoecious. Male catkins form in the previous autumn and hang in twos and threes along the stems, each flower reduced to four split stamens beneath two bracts. Female flowers sit in buds on the same twigs, with a short style and two stigmas apiece. On a given plant the two sexes normally ripen at different times, and hazel also carries a sporophytic incompatibility system, so a plantation needs several cultivars interplanted to set a full crop. Gardeners with room for one bush get catkins reliably and nuts irregularly, for exactly this reason.

Left alone, hazel produces a thicket of stems from the base instead of one trunk, a habit that made it the classic coppice wood of lowland Europe. The leaves are broad, rounded and ruffed with soft hairs, with a doubly toothed margin, and they turn a clear yellow before they fall.

Roasted hazelnuts go into praline, into the chocolate and nut paste of Piedmont known as gianduja, and into paste fillings for pastry, where the nut is ground fine enough to replace part of the flour. In the kitchen the nuts are best toasted in a moderate oven and rubbed in a cloth while warm, which lifts the bitter skins. Cold-pressed oil is used for dressings and for confectionery, and the crushed kernel is folded into ice cream and chocolate.

Cut to the ground on a long rotation, a hazel stool throws up long straight rods, the raw material for woven hurdles, thatching spars, peasticks and walking sticks. A working stool is cut in winter, and the rods are sorted by length while the sap is still down. Nuts from the same stools were once a cottage crop across southern England, and the shrub also feeds dormice, squirrels and jays.

Science & Biotechnology

The kernel is about sixty per cent fixed oil, dominated by oleic acid and carrying a good measure of alpha-tocopherol, which is why hazelnut oil keeps better than many pressed nut oils. Protein chemistry has given the nut its own allergen names, and Cor a 9 and Cor a 14 are the two most often linked with serious reactions, while Cor a 1 behaves as a pollen-food cross-reactant. Laboratories multiply elite material by axillary shoot culture, because hazel is slow and awkward to graft.

Uses & Benefits

Hazel arranges its year so that pollination happens while the shrub is bare. The long yellow catkins that open from mid-winter onward release clouds of pollen into any dry, mild breeze, and the female flowers they must reach are almost invisible: a tight green bud from which only a tuft of crimson stigmas protrudes. Most people who grow hazel for years have never seen them. Because the pollen is carried by wind and not by insects, a single well-grown bush can be dusted from trees a field away, and a whole hedge can act as one pollinating unit.

Eastern filbert blight is the disease that reshaped the crop. The fungus grows under the bark of hazel for a year or more before it produces rows of small black fruiting bodies, and it can kill a mature orchard. A single plant of Corylus avellana, selected in Washington State and known as Gasaway, carries strong resistance, and the gene behind it has been mapped and used widely in modern breeding, so that several current cultivars descend from one fortunate bush. Big bud mite is the other common affliction, swelling the buds into fat grey-green balls and spreading between plants on the wind.

Growing from Seed

Hazel seed must never be allowed to dry out, so sow the nuts fresh in autumn, about three centimetres deep, on their sides, in a mix of two parts loam, one part leafmould and one part grit. Cover the bed with wire netting: mice and squirrels will strip it otherwise, and jays bury and lose nuts across a whole garden. Space the nuts fifteen centimetres apart in the nursery row and expect the seed leaves to stay below ground while the shoot pushes up. Move the young plants when the first two true leaves have opened, handling the taproot carefully.

A hazel for nuts is grown as a single-stemmed tree on a short trunk, which means rubbing out the suckers that appear each spring. A hazel for rods is grown the opposite way, as a stool cut hard on rotation. Either way the shrub wants an annual mulch of compost and a top-up of potash rather than nitrogen, and it needs no winter protection at all. Bacterial blight can blacken the young shoots in a wet spring, and the nut weevil grubs out the kernel of a good part of every crop.

Our Take

Hazel is the most rewarding coppice plant a smallholding can carry, and its catkins are the first real sign the season has turned. If you have a wetter, colder site than hazel likes, the Turkish tree hazel is the one to try, and where space is tight the Chinese hazel makes a smaller, easy shrub. Gardeners in North America often start with the American hazelnut, which tolerates drier ground than the European species.

Tree Seeds