The Hazel Nut

A few years ago I found a very small hazel nut tree – actually it was a hazel nut with a sprout coming out of it – precariously perched at the edge of our front rockery and buried in pine straw under the shade of two decorative medium sized pine trees and already, even at its small size beginning to be entangled with the mesh of the cyclone fence.

I decided to rescue it from what I assumed would be an entirely unsatisfactory life entangled in the fence and fighting for sunlight with the pines. So I planted it in back in an area that I was trying to shape into some kind of low maintenance woodland sort of niche. I was trying to create a niche where birds would want to spend time.

The little hazel nut grew pretty well for a couple of seasons. It wasn’t very big, but it seemed happy enough and I felt that it would probably grow into a contributing member of the bird sanctuary. Then it almost got eliminated. Various cats decided for some reason that the hazelnut occupied the exact spot where they liked to dig and it was almost killed. But it wasn’t killed; and it recovered; and it continued to grow, albeit slowly.

Then last year it suddenly got really big.

Then this year it got even bigger. And this year it has decided that it needed to produce some nuts.