XLIII.— THE HAZEL. 
Corylus Avellana Linne. 
K NOWN to yield an edible seed in autumn, the Hazel is as familiar as the 
Hornbeam is the reverse. It seldom has the habit of a tree, sending up 
numerous suckers and branching freely from the base of its stems. The young 
twigs are- of a rusty brown, with a soft down and blunt rounded buds ; but the bark 
on older stems becomes smooth and is marked by prominent transverse lentice/s, or 
linear cork-warts, the channels of transpiration. 
The Hazel is the earliest of our native trees and shrubs to come into flower, 
its catkins, formed during the preceding summer, opening in January, or even as 
early as October, though often not until March, while its leaves do not expand 
until the end of April or the beginning of May. Staminate and pistillate catkins 
occur on the same tree, but seldom reach maturity simultaneously, some trees being 
protandrous and others protogynous. The male or staminate catkins, to which the 
names “ Cats’-tails ” or “ Lambs’-tails ” properly belong, are pendulous, dull brown, 
sausage-like structures at first, borne four or five together on a “ dwarf-shoot ” or 
arrested branch, one terminal, the rest lateral. As they mature, however, they 
lengthen to two inches or more, becoming a pale greenish-yellow or primrose colour, 
and more decidedly green just after they have discharged their pollen. Each of the 
many small catkin-scales has in its axil two bracteoles, and four stamens so deeply 
bifurcate as to appear as eight. Each of the eight filaments terminates in a half 
anther tufted with hair, much as in the Hornbeam, and the whole structure probably 
represents a single tetrandrous flower. There is no perianth. Clouds of yellow 
pollen are shaken out by March gales, when there are no leaves on the trees to 
prevent it from being carried to the stigmas, and soon the empty catkins turn from 
green to brown and drop off. 
The female flowers are grouped, eight to twelve together, in little egg-shaped, 
bud-like catkins, terminating dwarf-shoots, but apparently sessile on the upper side 
of a shoot. Each catkin consists of brown scales with silvery stipules, rudimentary 
foliage-leaves, and from four to six white, silky bracts, in the axil of each of which 
are two lateral flowers with the most minute six-toothed representation of the 
bracteoles. The flower itself is a minute two-chambered ovary, from the summit of 
which the two conspicuous crimson stigmas rise beyond the scales of the catkin. 
When the ovary begins to enlarge, after the wind has carried the pollen to its 
stigmas, a fringe-like perianth is perceptible round its summit, which will be 
recognisable as a circular line round the upper end of the green nut, and the rings of 
bracteoles grow out as the leafy husk or “ cupule ” which surrounds the base of the 
fruit. Meanwhile the dwarf-shoot elongates, so that the nuts when ripe are borne 
away from the parent branch on a leafy shoot. Only a few flowers of each female 
catkin will ultimately form nuts, and in each nut, as a rule, only one of the two 
ovules becomes a seed or kernel. 
