Outdoors: The plants in my street - hazel

plant of the month: hazel

There are two main varieties of hazel, and the most common one has the Latin (scientific) name Corylus avellana. It is found all over the UK as a small tree or a bushy shrub in parks, gardens and the countryside.

What to look for:

• Hazels can be pruned frequently and can grow many new stems from one spot in the ground. You are likely to find several of them together.
• The leaves are quite thick and more or less round and symmetrical, with deep veins running from a central vein. The leaves have ‘serrated’ (tooth-like) edges and are wider at the top than by the stem and are also hairy. Hazel catkins are bright yellow in winter then and go light brown and flaky.
• Hazel leaves are quite similar to those of elms and limes. You can tell the difference because hazel leaves are hairy.
  
  

fact file

• The catkins are sometimes called lambs tails because they’re so fluffy and droopy.
• Hazels have male and female buds: the long droopy yellow catkins are male, emerging from green buds, and the dark red flowers are small and emerge from dark red buds. At this time of year you should be able to spot both on the same plant (see picture, right).
• Hazelnuts, which begin to ripen from September, are ‘tree nuts’ and can trigger allergic reactions, but the rest of the tree – its branches, leaves and catkins – is fine to play with.
  
  

superhero feature

• Hazel is definitely a superhero plant – if you have a space for even just one, you’ll get years of ecological and play value from it.
• Not many deciduous trees have colour in winter, but hazel catkins and buds add a zing of colour – they are also an early source of food for birds and bees, making them doubly valuable.
• Hazel is one of the trees that happily tolerates hard pruning, regrowing rapidly with lovely flexible, thin stems that you can harvest and use for play and projects. When their stems are cut close to the ground (called coppicing), the tree reacts by growing several new stems. This makes them really useful in schools and settings as you’ll have an endless supply of fabulous, bendy, straight sticks.
  
  

aims of this series

Many of us suffer from ‘plant blindness’. But if we don't notice common plants around us, how can we teach the next generation? So, every month during 2023, we’ll look at some of the main features of common plants and explore how to make the most of them for play and learning, plus how they might enhance your landscape.

There are a few tools and resources that will help you make the most of hazel explorations, so if you don't already own them, put out a call to parents and local businesses to see if they can donate, and check charity shops and car boot sales:

• Secateurs to cut stems, loppers or asmall pruning saw for thicker stems.
• Jewellers’ loupes and magnifiers for close examination of leaves, bark and catkins.
• Gardeners’ twine/wire/string/hot glue gun.

These plants make up part of the ‘Pappus Top 15’ plants for play and learning (see www.pappusproject.eu).

hazel projects

• Use fresh, intact yellow hazel catkins to create lines and swirls on collages, or squash mature, dry catkins into piles of soft flaky seeds and use them like glitter sprinkles. The heavily veined leaves are useful for paint prints and rubbings.
• Hazel rods are useful for den-building – push the thickest ends of a dozen stems into the ground, perhaps making a circle. Tie all the thin ends together to make a pyramid shape, or bend them over and tie them to the opposite rod to create an igloo effect. Fill in the gaps with weaved boughs, or throw over a blanket or tarp for a quick and easily dismantled den.
• Thicker hazel rods make great walking sticks, and older children that can whittle might like to strip the bark and use loppers or a garden saw to cut their rod to size. If you can find sanding blocks, they offer a combination of physicality challenges – big movements from the arm and shoulder from sanding, and fine movements from gripping the block and decorating with nail polishes or pens.
  
  

hazel springboards

• In winter, look for the tiny deep red buds, and catkins growing from green buds, on hazel stems. Put them in water so children can examine them. Revisit the tree, if you can, each week to watch the red buds burst into flowers and the green ones turn into vivid yellow catkins.
• Hazel leaps into life in spring, with catkins, bright green leaves to squash and to sniff, and a huge variety of insects and birds looking for food or nesting material. Show children how to pinch the top of a catkin, and then pull it through their fingers by its stem – each individual seed will separate and fly away, as nature intended.
• Towards the end of summer, hazelnuts begin to appear, wrapped in tissue-thin petals. Children will enjoy ‘unwrapping’ them to find the still-soft nut inside, covered in fuzzy, peach-like down – although take note, hazelnuts cannot be handled by people with tree nut allergies.
• While you can cut hazel stems at any time of year, autumn is a good time to do it as the plant's growth cycle slows. If you’ve found a hazel copse, or are lucky enough to have one of your own, use sharp secateurs to cut thin stems down to the ground, and store them for use over the winter.
  
  

Communication/ speech/language

Use arm's-length pieces of hazel as stroll story sticks (sometimes called journey sticks). Take a stroll around the garden – or a local green space – and collect interesting objects that tell the story of the walk you took together.

Each child should choose their own items – although they might like to work in pairs, as attaching the items to the stick (using wool, string or elastic bands) is easier if two children work together. Back at base, explore the story sticks as a group.

next month – nettles

Nettles are an incredibly important plant, so next month, just as they begin to spring up in every verge and garden, I’ll be offering dozens of suggestions for how to enjoy and use them. It shouldn't be too difficult to find a nettle patch…

myth, magic and culture

Druids used hazel rods for self-defence. Many children want to use long sticks as swords or lightsabres, so you can reduce some of the inevitable scuffles by showing them how to use hazel rods as staffs, gripping the rod at each end and clashing them together in the middle, thereby avoiding fingers and faces.

Forked hazel twigs were often favoured by water diviners – find a few forked branches on a ‘bushy’ hazel and set up a search for water in your garden. I bet every child will find some water – it's magic!

hazelnut stories

For a very traditional tale, Beatrix Potter's Squirrel Nutkin is the story of a group of red squirrels harvesting hazelnuts from an old owl's island. This has a strong moral undertone, with Beatrix's beautiful illustrations.

A more modern tale, with a theme of friendship and sharing, is The Last Hazelnut(by Susana Isern and Mariana Ruiz Johnson, Barefoot Books, 2020) in which two friends share a hazelnut hoard and then have to work out how to overcome a disagreement.

Old Barn's Little Hazelnutis a stunning pop-up book with striking graphics – you can watch a flick-through of it on YouTube before you decide to buy; it's beautiful, but not for younger children to explore on their own.

hazel STEM projects

If you are able to harvest lots of catkins, set up a maths provocation in a tuff tray outdoors with measuring equipment such as rulers, string, multi-links, paint colour matching cards and numbers. Can children make patterns, order the catkins by length, match the colours?

Hazel rods or stems are strong and flexible and are traditionally used to make fence panels called hurdles. Push at least four sturdy rods into the ground, no more than 30cm apart. Use thinner rods to weave horizontally backwards and forwards through the uprights, making sure that the thickest part of each rod is at one end of the hurdle. It takes some practice and is a brilliantly physical activity for small arms and hands, demanding strength, collaboration and perseverance. Check out Monty Don's video on YouTube.

Give a worn-out bird box a new lease of life. Help children measure lengths of hazel sticks to hot-glue horizontally along the walls and roof of the bird house, turning it into a log cabin for birds.