By
mid January this year the catkins were already plump on the hazel bushes on
Magog Down. Catkins are, of course, the male flowers of the bush, their
pendulous habit allowing the release to every passing breeze of wind-borne
pollen from their yellow anthers. The female flowers (which appear somewhat
later than the catkins) are easily overlooked, consisting as they do of tight
clusters of red styles no more that 5mm long. The nuts, produced in September
and October are too well known to need description.
Hazel was common and widespread in
Britain’s prehistoric forests and with the arrival of humans to our shores
it soon found a use as a source of small poles for wattling, fencing, hurdles
and huts. In my youth on the Holkham Estate we used to coppice it for
pea-sticks and bean poles until, with the rise in labour costs, the price of
the sticks outstripped the value of the crops they were sold to support! Hazel
has a very long history as a coppiced shrub, often being cropped as an
undershrub in woodland with oak standards.The varied uses to which our ancestors put hazel wood extended from using chips of it to purify wine, to Roger Bacon’s use of charcoal made from it to manufacture gunpowder. We were always told that hazel twigs were the best ones to use for water divining. I note that some modern diviners now use wires from old coat-hangers - which always seem to me to lack that certain “something”!
Like the rowan, hazel was considered powerful against all enchantment. Its mythology is rich and its supposed magical properties were as extensive and varied as its practical uses. If, for example, you wish to become invisible, the Boke of St Albans (1496) suggests that you carry a nine foot hazel rod as thick as your arm with a smaller rod fitted into it (try that if you must, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it will make you more, rather than less, conspicuous in the streets of Cambridge!).
And if you prefer mysticism to magic what better quotation can I give you than that from Dame Julian of Norwich :
“He showed me a little thing, the quality of a hazel-nut in the palm of my hand ... I looked thereon ... and thought : What can this be? And it was answered: It is all that is made. And I marvelled how it might last ... And I was answered : It lasteth and ever shall last, for that God loveth it”.
April 2002