Lambs' tails

Lambs’ tails.

1955: My first school was in Sutton Scotney near Winchester. We only lived there for a year or so and I wouldn’t recognise the place today. Can you believe that the classroom wall had a Victorian alphabet frieze all the way round and that we copied the letters onto slates with white chalks? A bulky woman teacher with weight-lifter’s arms patrolled the isles between our desks while holding a wet rag to wipe away our offerings. If we did a god job, then we moved on to the next letter; if not, we did the same letter again. I probably only reached “d for dunce” before we left. The slates were also good for rolling plasticine on, which I was good at. The only good thing about the school was that it backed onto a railway that mostly carried goods such as water-cress from the chalk-beds by the River Dever. We would all run to the window or the back fence to wave at the steam trains.

More vividly, I remember my walks to school along a narrow lane lined with hedges that were bursting with blossom while being serenaded with bird song. That’s when I learned about pussy willow and lambs’ tails from my mum. They are ingrained in me as the totems of early spring when most flowers and most insects have not yet emerged. Both trees mostly have to rely in the wind for pollination, though early bumblebees will visit the willows. 

Except when living abroad, I can’t remember a spring when I didn’t celebrate the appearance of lamb’s tails. They seem to come earlier every year. In January 2021 the first male catkins had been out since Christmas but the tiny red female flowers were not to be found. If they get too far out of sync there will be no hazel nuts.

Yellow lambs’ tails are the male catkins of hazel trees. You find them wiggling in the breeze just like their namesakes waggle their tails when suckling from the ewes. Of course, it’s lambing time now, at least in the south, so the name is even more apt. 

Come with me now and take a closer look. Bring the children along too, and a bag or sandwich box to store ant treasures we find.

The dancing movement and the colour of the catkins attracts our attention and I go for a closer look, cradling a catkin in my hand where I can see the pollen. It leaves a dusty yellow smudge on my wrinkled palm. If we cut a few twigs to take home we can put them in a jam jar of water on the window sill. The little red female flower (more of a bud really) isn’t out yet but it will emerge indoors and, quite soon afterwards, fresh wrinkled green leaves will emerge. But we’r not finished looking and it’s not time to go home yet. 

The second hazel ritual that we perform is to scrabble around among the hazel roots where we can find a treasure-trove of snails’-shells, seeds, woodlice, ladybirds and broken hazel nuts from the previous season. We can handle and admire the living things carefully and release them but we can keep the shells of the nuts and of the snails for later. I like to arrange them on pieces of card and glue them down, making patterns and collages. Each card is a keep-sake, like a diary page of a special day, so I write the date on it. 

At this time of year there may be snowdrops, aconites, primroses and crocuses in flower while the shoots of bluebells might be pushing upward, so we should avoid treading on them. Probably, here in the village, all of those flowers will have spread from garden plants, but there is at least one special wild plant that grows only on the roots of hazel trees. Toothwort is a parasitic plant, like broomrape. It has no green parts to make chlorophyll and takes all its nutrients fro the hazel. I have only found it growing in lime rich areas.

When I was a young teacher on Salisbury Plain we took my class on a week-long springtime stay at Oxenwood Field Centre. It rained and blew a gale every day so we made short forays along the lanes and footpaths collecting material to build our own replica of a hedge indoors. We identified all the woody species in the hedge, collected their twigs and made prints with the leaves; we worked out the age of the hedge by the number of species in a 30 yard length and we painted violets and primroses and twined ivy and honeysuckle around the twigs that we had stood in pails of water in front of our painted frieze.  If you have children or grandchildren this kind of session is an ideal home education experience that includes a healthy field trip, a bit of exploring and some material to work on at home.

The nutshells are the best treasure of all. Some are split in half by squirrels, some cracked roughly by nuthatches and others gnawed by mice. In Brampton Wood you can find shells that have been nibbled by hazel dormice. Dormice make a neat hole in the shell like mice do, but without any teethmarks on the outside of the shell. (You can find an identification sheet on-line. Try the UK Safari site.)

Although hazel is a native tree, it is very hard to find one that has been allowed to grow to its full majesty. They are either part of a hedge or they are coppiced to produce bean-poles, pea-sticks, walking sticks, charcoal and even firewood. Coppice used to be the main habitat for nightingales in the UK but now they seem to prefer scrubland. As well as in Brampton Wood you can find hazel coppice in Hinchingbrooke Country Park and Paxton Pits Nature Reserve. The long straight wands grow very quickly as long as the muntjac don’t get to them. Flexible two to three year old stems are used to bind in the tops of laid hedges while ash poles are used for the uprights. 

After the Paxton volunteers showed me how to lay a hedge in the Northampton style I tried making my own version at home, planting hazel, field maple, spindle and a few blackthorns. The hazel took off, leaving all the others standing in their shade. I should have planted the thorns first, or in greater quantity. Still, lots of hazel should mean lots of useful sticks and piles of nuts. Unfortunately, there’s a grey squirrel who thought the same thing. He only comes when the nuts are on the trees and he eats them when they are still green, or he buries them in the garden where they spring up as fresh hazel-whips. 

Like the oak and  the rowan tree, hazel has had a close, traceable association with people for 6000 years. Piles of burned shells have been found in early settlements, proving that the nuts were a very important food item, but it goes deeper than that. One tradition is to name your nut after someone who you might marry. The way the shell burns on the fire is an indication of how things might pan out. Will it smoulder? Will it flare brightly? Will it crackle and jump?

The wood is magical too: think of Moses’ or Gandalf’s staff or Harry’s wand. All those walking sticks and staffs look so special, especially the ones that have a twisty spiral caused by strangling honeysuckle vines. Hazel rods are used for dowsing and water divining. 

When Christianity took hold in England pagan ceremonies, festivals and games were too hard to suppress so the Church took them on board. Annual hazel nut gathering days were unruly affairs, like May Day when folk could go into the woods and get up to mischief. A bishop called Philibert was chosen to be the patron saint of hazel nuts and no doubt the annual nutting day now incorporated a lengthy sermon in the church. 

Today it is almost impossible to find a crop of hazel nuts in England due to the grey squirrels so we import a lot of nuts are imported and they may be cob nuts or filberts (Philiberts) which are cultivated strains. 

(To find out more about London’s hazel trees (and a lot more) read “Ghost Trees” by Bob Gilbert.)