MOTHER HAZEL

Hazel showed people how to coppice, from Scandinavia to North Africa. The tree was one of the first broadleaves to clothe the land after the Ice Age, spreading north from its refugia, following pine and soon competing with elm, oak, and alder, but preceding most other trees. Jays and magpies would carry the nuts north and the plants might germinate but never flower. As it warmed, flowers and fruits emerged, and hazel groves took root. Like the alder, hazel grew in thick stands with a natural multistem form, sprouting six, eight, twelve, or more times from the root collar, but unlike alder, hazel had a tasty and nutritious nut. The plant naturally sprouted again and again from the base. New stems of hazel might be only six years old, when the root mass beneath was two hundred.

In the Mesolithic, ten millennia ago, hazelnuts were a principal food. They are the most frequently found nut in the old hearths of Europe. They could also be eaten raw. By burning or cutting sections of woodland, people could keep the land sunny enough that the stems would bear their yellow early spring male catkins, their tiny carmine female flowers, and their clutches of acorn-sized nuts. The people learned that if you took a slender stem and stapled it to the ground with slender willow rods, it would sprout new roots, spreading the plant into new territory. They also learned that if you could break a few stems, even more stems would sprout back, each of these new trunks would flower and fruit, and they would begin to bear nuts about five years earlier than a hazel that had been grown from seed. The sections that you burned might also give back straight slender stems to make baskets and fish traps.

Hazelnuts often fall into the water, and some may have been transported to new homes along the streams. (They usually sink though. Norwegian kids sometimes tell which to eat by putting a handful in water. The ones that float are empties.) Fion mac Cumhail was the servant of a bard who fished for a famous salmon. The fish had eaten nine hazelnuts from nine trees that grew around a pool of wisdom, thus becoming possessed of all knowledge. If you were to eat this fish, you yourself would acquire its wisdom. Finally, the bard caught it. He gave the finny savant to his servant to cook, warning him not to take even a little bite of it. Accidentally, Fion burned his thumb on the juices in the pan. The wisdom went into him.

Maybe it was the hazel-fed salmon’s knowledge that invented the sharp, durable Neolithic axe, a tool as different from its predecessor as a sledge hammer from a chain saw. With it, hazel became a principal instrument of culture. Whenever you cut it, it quickly resprouted, giving two or three stems for one. Seeing it repeat its multistem habit, people likely tried other trees: alder, ash, oak, birch, linden, spindle, rowan. Sure enough, even trees that typically grew only a single trunk would often grow back as multistems, just like the hazel. There appeared an industry of poles: some as slender as your finger, some thicker than your arm, the largest (and hardest to cut) as big around as a stockpot.

Home grew up around hazel. It made the slimmest and most flexible of rods. It was good to start fires, to make charcoal, to split for basketry, to use as the wood infill in wattle walls, to make woven fencing. It was the best binder in the whole Neolithic. You could twist and split it to hold the thatching on roofs or to make hedges keep their shape. You could tie the brushy tops into faggots to fuel the maltings. You could coppice it early when the pollen-rich catkins had just blown up, or coppice it late when the autumn-held leaves were still on the stem. In both cases, the cuts stems went to feed sheep or cattle.

The Celtic ogham alphabet called its ninth letter coll , which means hazel. This symbol, a horizontal stem with four short rising branches, is as close to an ideogram as you will find in Western writing systems. It is a coppiced hazel.

With or without ogham, however, hazel wands were communicators. Magic wands were often made of hazel. Dowsing rods, for help in finding water, always were. Yeats’s Aengus made a fishing pole of peeled hazel rod and with it caught a fairy girl. One of the stories of Tristan and Isolde tells how a hazel rod became a go-between. In this version, Tristan, learning that his lover, Isolde, the queen, would be passing along a certain road on her way to see the king, hid himself in a hazel coppice. Splitting a rod in four pieces, he inscribed his name on it and a message. One ingenious scholar had him also inscribe the ogham for hazel, joined to the ogham for honeysuckle, uilleann . (Oliver Rackham reported in his study of Neolithic woven trackways that indeed the hazel stems often showed the marks of twined honeysuckle.) As the poem describes the two of them entwined like honeysuckle around a hazel stem, so the inscribed stick might have repeated the trope. Whatever it was, it must have been subtle enough to pass notice for all but Isolde, who, seeing it, drew aside from the procession, entered the wood, and met her lover there.