Plant · P-549

European Hazel

Corylus avellana

European Hazel is the commercial hazelnut, and the same shrub also supplies flexible coppiced rods for hurdles, baskets and pea sticks. It fruits on old wood, so cutting it hard for a rod harvest trades away that year's nuts. It needs a second, genetically different hazel planted nearby to pollinate it, since a lone plant sets little fruit. Where eastern filbert blight is present it kills most unselected plants outright, so only a handful of named resistant varieties can be grown safely there.