Numerous willies, Dick Whittington, hazelnut butter and Stevie Nicks
Abundance: Wednesday 21 February 2024
I should trust the forecast. The sheets that are currently turning clockwise in the drier should be pegged to the line that hangs between the fence and the greenhouse. Today’s warm wind feels two months early and is perfect for ruffling bed linen; instead, it is invisibly up to something wonderful.
In the top corner of the garden, the hazel - recently the subject of my wife’s enthusiastic chopping for pea and bean poles - is hanging its lamb’s tail catkins; the plant waving its many willies at anyone who cares to look.
Those pale, male tassels may contain as many as three hundred flowers. The scales you can see cover four pairs of stamens: when the time is right, the scales lift, the stamens split, and pollen is released.
Hazels carry female flowers separately and with much less fuss and palaver. Look up the branch a little and you might see small female buds, with their flourish of crimson. A bud might contain up to four flowers, each of which has four tiny, pink-red stigmas ready to receive pollen1.
When the pollen is released, you have to hope that the female flowers have pushed their stigmas into the light - and equally importantly - that there is a light breeze to carry the pollen to them.
Every time pollen reaches a flower, you get one nut; for each female bud, a cluster of perhaps four nuts.
Despite carrying male and female flowers, a hazel is self-sterile; it needs a partner. Luckily the old hedge behind the greenhouse, jammed with a few interesting species, delivers. Or at least it does if there’s a breeze of just the right intensity and direction. A breeze like today’s.