A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1343 entries
hazel
Hazel is a multi-stemmed shrub or small tree of woodland understory and hedge, carrying long yellow catkins in late winter before any leaf, and nuts in autumn. It responds to being cut by throwing up a crop of straight poles from the stump, which is the basis of coppicing, and a hazel stool cut on a cycle can go on producing for centuries.
Etymology
The word is Old English and has cognates across the Germanic languages. The eye color is named from the nut, and the name Hazel came into use as a girl’s name in the nineteenth century along with a wave of other plant names. The nut itself has two English names, hazelnut and filbert, the second from Saint Philibert, whose feast day falls when the nuts ripen.
Notes
Coppiced hazel is the raw material of an entire vanished economy: hurdles, wattle for building, thatching spars, bean poles, barrel hoops, and charcoal. Hazel is also the traditional wood for a dowsing rod. Nuts found at a Mesolithic site on Colonsay in the Hebrides show hundreds of thousands of shells roasted in a single pit around 7000 BC.