While hazel is usually a large shrub, it can grow to the size of a small tree. Hazel is plentiful in copses, oak woods and hedgerows. It is common throughout most of Britain, Europe, America, Africa, Turkey and western Asia and thrives in damp places near ponds or streams, though it fruits better if the land has drainage. It has various species to its family.
The bark of the hazel is smooth and light brown in colour. It is speckled with lighter brown lenticels, the pores of the tree, where the cells of the bark are drawn apart to let air pass to the inner tissue, allowing the tree to breathe. Hazel leaves open in early spring. They are a beautiful lime green in colour, grow singly on the branches and are a pointed oval, slightly heart-shaped and asymmetrical. They turn from their summer colour of mid-green to greeny-browns and pinks in the autumn.
Often as early as January, its male catkins, or ‘lamb’s tails’, leave behind their stiff winter brownness as they grow and fill with pollen, becoming like tassels of gold which hang vividly against the dark bareness of the winter branches. They shed pollen to the wind long before the first appearance of leaf and flower on the land, save perhaps the snowdrop.
The female flowers are small, with red styles which look like small crimson brushes. Once the hazel’s pollination is complete, the male catkins fade, their work done.
The hazelnuts are ripe by September and can be eaten straight from the tree. The shape of the leafy frills around them distinguishes the hazel species. Hazelnuts keep for thousands of years in petrified form and many (hard and black as jet) are found in ancient bogland.
CUSTOM & LEGEND
The most prolific legends concerning hazel come from Ireland. A king named Mac Coll, meaning ‘Son of Hazel’, was one of the three earliest rulers in Ireland. Mac Coll was one of the last kings of the Tuatha de Danaan. The hazel tree from which he took his name and power was specifically associated with wisdom.
Druidic legends concerning Connla’s Well tell of the salmon of wisdom. This father of all salmon, when first going to sea, was drawn to the magical well and his journeyings thence instilled in all future salmon their migratory genes. On reaching the well the salmon was given the great gift of wisdom by the well’s guardians, for each of the nine hazel trees surrounding the well dropped a sacred hazelnut into the water. On swallowing these nuts the salmon became the recipient of all knowledge.
Druidic legend also tells of Fionn, a pupil of a chief druid who lived on the River Boyne. The druid master intended to eat the salmon of knowledge which he had caught in a deep pool, for its flesh, it was said, ‘would make him conscious of everything that was happening in Ireland’. Young Fionn was told to cook the salmon for his master, but not to taste it. Yet while he cooked the fish he burnt his thumb and automatically put it into his mouth for relief. Thus it was Fionn who received the salmon’s gift of farsight, ‘seeing all that was happening in the High Courts of Tara’. This story has a Welsh equivalent in the legend of Cerridwen and Gwion.
The Roman god Mercury and the Greek god Hermes both carried a staff of hazel, sometimes depicted with two ribbons attached to it, to show its speed through the air. Often these ribbons were shown as snakes intertwining along the staff, forming the caduceus symbol of the healing arts used by healers and physicians to this day.
Thus the spirit of the hazel is strongly aligned to speed through the air as well as through water, and in its legendary links with the sacred salmon we see possibly the birth of both these elemental associations, for salmon swim exceedingly fast in water and then leave the waters in mighty leaps, appearing to fly through the air.
In Wales supple hazel twigs were woven into ‘wishing-caps’ which granted the desire of the wearer. Pilgrim’s staffs were made from hazel and so attached did the owners become to them that they were buried alongside them after death.
HEALING
As the tree of immortality hazel was especially revered, and because its nuts were believed to contain all wisdom they were in themselves talismans for a healthy life. Hazel was esteemed as a plant of great virtue, said to have the power to cure fevers, diarrhoea and excessive menstrual flow.
An old country charm to prevent toothache was to carry a double hazelnut in the pocket, and a cross of hazel wood laid on a snake-bite was said to draw out the poison.
The kernels of the hazelnut, mixed with mead or honeyed water, are good for coughs which will not clear. Mixed with pepper in decoction they clear the head.
The greatest healing provided by hazel is found within its atmosphere. Being near hazel trees or meditating upon a piece of hazel brings the spirit alive and allows us to quickly cast off the old and move on to the new. Hazel’s atmosphere exudes exhilaration and inspiration.
MAGIC & INSPIRATION
Hazel has always been regarded as magical for its presence inspires our intuitional senses. It was called the ‘poet’s tree’, for in the minds of the ancients it had great associations with faerie lore and supposedly allowed entrance into such realms.
Druids carried rods made from hazel to gain poetic and magical inspiration and, under certain conditions, druids used hazel to invoke invisibility.
The hazel is powerful in early spring when its energy and sap are surging outward, and in autumn, when its energy is contained within its harvest of magical nuts. Such timings should be noted when cutting wands or staffs. Traditionally hazel twigs and forks for divining should be cut on Midsummer’s Eve in order for them to be at their most powerful.
Hazel can be used at all times for protection. Its ruling planets, the Sun and Mercury, make it a brilliant healing plant.
As shown by its legends and by its preference for growing in damp places, hazel is strongly associated with the qualities of water. Thus on many levels it has great association with the moon, controller of the tides on earth.
The epitome of hazel energy, the movement and the emotion and the visuals, is shown by the magical salmon, the ‘flying-fish’ which leaps from the water in pure exhilaration, like flashing quicksilver. Ancient druids observed Nature closely and such association was exemplified in their teachings and legends.
However, druidic teachings also tell us how the hazel could transform itself for defence, for if necessary it became gnarled and leafless, dripping poisonous milk, and was known as the ‘dripping hazel’. In this context, those who attempted to enter the highest magical realms, if they had not truth within their hearts would face such a guardian, which no doubt fed upon the bones of profanity!
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