The Forager's Guide: Hazel (Corylus avellana)

AKA: Cobnuts, Kentish Cobs

Where: Woodland, Hedgerows. Common throughout UK

What: Nuts only

When: August – October

The wonderfully versatile Hazel Nut is a major win for foragers – tasty and useful, and they keep well.

Hazel is a commonly occurring shrub-like small tree, often reaching a height of about 8m but seldom more, and which can be found just about anywhere in the United Kingdom. It has a shiny greyish-brown bark, with horizontal pores and vertical cracks in the older examples. The leaves appear in early spring - hairy buds at first, then small leaves, growing until they reach their mature size in high summer. These measure c.10 x 8cm, and are a rounded or oval shape, broad and coming to a point, hairy and clearly marked with deep straight veins coming from a central rib.

The classic aspect of the tree is the catkin, the cylindrical male flower hanging down in groups. Yellow in colour and made up of tiny sepals, they measure up to 10cm long, and appear in early spring, before the leaves arrive, along with the tiny (0.3cm) red female flowers hidden in buds.

The nut arrives in August, emerging in groups of up to 5, each enclosed in a leafy green ‘cup’, often with reddish highlights. They are rounded or oval in shape with a round rough spot at one end, measure up to 2cm, and are very hard and shiny with striations running down the length of the body – actually very pretty to look at. The immature specimen is a pale green colour, shiny and hard, but these mature into the classic brown nut.

The immature pale nuts are also edible, being vaguely fruity in taste and milky in texture – the advantage here is that animals don’t seem to like them, so they are all yours for the taking. Eat them at once as they don’t keep well in nut form, or process them further, possibly into a pesto, to enable them to last. However, by late September the nuts will be turning that classic Hazel colour – a beautiful deep brown, with a taste to match. Collect them as soon as they are ripe or you will be fighting the whole animal world for them, particularly the squirrels which prize them highly. Sometimes the nuts that the tree produces will be empty, so it is worth opening a few as you go along as a representative sample – if they are empty, move on to the next tree.

They are a very versatile food, very tasty and as they are up to 60% oil, they are a prized foodstuff for animal and forager. If they are left in their shells and stored in a dark dry place, they will keep for up to a year, so used sparingly (or taken in a huge harvest) they will last until next season.