THE HAZEL. 
Cor'ylus Avella'na. 
Tue Hazel seldom has the habit or dimensions of 
a tree. It is generally a shrub, sending up many 
slender limbs remarkable for their brown bark and 
their great flexibility. At Eastwell Park, Kent, 
however, it is a tree thirty feet in height, with a 
girth of three feet at the ground. 
The young twigs are hairy and glandular and of 
a rusty-brown hue, and the blunt rounded buds 
have their scales fringed with reddish glandular 
hairs. The flowers appear in January, or ex- 
ceptionally even as early as October, but are most 
frequently not open until March, whilst the leaves 
do not open until the end of April or beginning 
of May. The male and female blossoms occur on 
the same tree, but in distinct clusters or “ catkins.” 
The male catkins are pendulous, first appearing 
as minute sausage-shaped buds of a dull brownish 
hue, but lengthening to two inches or more, and 
becoming, when the anthers are fully matured, of 
a pale greenish-yellow or primrose colour, which is 
more decidedly green when the pollen has been 
shed. Each catkin consists of a number of bract- 
like scales, each of these bearing eight anthers on 
its inner surface, so that a cloud of fine-grained 
yellow pollen is shaken from them by the March 
gales, after discharging which they drop off. 
28 5T 
