Hazel, our ancient building block

The two hazels in our garden have now come fully into leaf, the broad soft leaves shading the ground beneath and adding a splash of soft green to the garden. I planted the hazels when we first moved here because they are one of my favourite shrubs; you could never really call the hazel a tree since it only rarely grows with a single stem or to a great height.

The hazel is familiar to most people; it is a shrub to which you were probably introduced as a child, the spring catkins a curiosity and referred to as lamb’s tails. These catkins start to develop in the autumn and, if you look carefully, you should just be able to make them out as two or three tiny green-grey cylinders. As autumn moves through into winter and then emerges into spring, so the catkins lengthen to reach their familiar two-inch long pliant shape, yellow with pollen and a symbol of the new season ahead. The female flowers are far less conspicuous and you have to look hard to see them. They can be found in the form of a swollen bud, tucked up on the upperparts of a shoot. Several fine crimson threads emerge from the bud, forming the female flower.

Hazel was one of the first trees to recolonise Britain, following the retreating ice sheets. However, it does not do well in deep shade and, with the arrival of taller trees, it was shaded out and lost from much of the new wildwood that formed. The hazel that remained was along the forest edge, or on terrain that the taller trees could not colonise. As Man began to take control of the forest, opening it up for cultivation, so the hazel returned and its value was quickly discovered. The shrub has a tendency to put up new shoots whenever a branch is lost or damaged, a behaviour described by Richard Mabey as ‘self-coppicing’. This meant that our ancestors could take a harvest from the hazel knowing that it would regrow. The particular value of the wood taken from hazel is that it is very flexible and can be bent into sharp angles without breaking. In addition it can be split lengthways, allowing it to be put to a wide ranges of uses. Since the Neolithic times it has been used to make wattle, the split canes woven into a lattice. The resulting structure could be used for fencing or as the building blocks for wattle and daub walls. It is still used for fencing today, as well as for pegging down thatch and for catching sediment to prevent riverbank erosion. It remains a truly versatile shrub.