Three weeks into the new year, with snow merely a chilly memory, rain holding off, and the sun hiding behind grey clouds, I set off for a walk in my local park, Stanley Park, looking for signs of spring. I am especially in search of flowers.
In January?
I realize that January, even in temperate Vancouver, is rather too early in the year to be looking for signs of spring, but I find them nevertheless.
First, I spot clusters of snowdrops, their tentative green sheaths of young leaves poking up through brown soil. Little white tips show on some of the green sheaths.
I keep walking.
I pass under the English oaks and London plane trees that will be noisy come March. This is the colony of Pacific Great Blue Herons. It’s near the tennis courts and the Vancouver Park Board offices on Park Lane. With no leaves on these deciduous trees, there is nothing to block my view of some of the more-than-a-hundred heron nests.
Taking the foot path through the Putting Green (it’s best not to walk on sodden soil to avoid its compaction), I see ahead of me a pale yellow cloud. It’s a thicket of common hazel (Corylus avellana), looking almost like a vase-shaped standard, no matter that this pale yellow cloud grows deceptively from dozens of single suckers. And the pale yellow is furnished by the multitude of long male catkins that are not quite ready to have their pollen blown onto the minute pink female flowers scattered here and there.
Through its ability to sucker strongly, Corylus is a self-perpetuating genus; some might call it a weed. It is native to all of Europe. Indeed, after the end of the last glaciation of the Quaternary Ice Age, some 11,700 years before present, hazels repopulated the entire island of Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales). This shrubby genus helped to retain the newly revealed soil against wind, rain, and heat. The earliest humans in Britain appreciated the nuts.
The genus name Corylus comes from the Greek word for “helmet”—korys—and refers to the husk on the nut, the involucre.
The specific epithet of avellana is named for the city of Avella in the Province of Avellino, southern Italy.
‘Contorta’ is a cultivar of Corylus avellana; it is commonly known as Harry Lauder’s walking stick or corkscrew hazel, because of its crinkled leaves and twigs. There are several bushes of ‘Contorta’ in Stanley Park and it makes a great ornamental shrub or tree, depending on how it is pruned.
Corylus avellana’s close relative Corylus maxima (known as large filbert or giant hazel) is farmed for its nuts, which are longer and slimmer than hazelnuts and are called filberts. The fruit of this species is named for Saint Philibert, a seventh-century French monk who founded the Abbey of Jumièges on the River Seine north of Paris. The mission of the monks under Philibert’s guidance was to reclaim waste land. And hazels certainly do this.
The avellana thicket in Stanley Park, perhaps four feet across, clearly began some time ago with two slim hazel saplings; now the original duo are surrounded by many vigorous, slender offspring. During the next month or so, the male catkins and female flowers will continue to mature, the wind will blow, and pollen grains will fertilize the ovules below the deep pink petals. I wonder why the tiny flowers are such an appealing pink when this is a wind-pollinated species!
After the flowers have matured, many simple, deeply veined, doubly serrate leaves will emerge, turning the cloud of yellow into a bush of green.
As spring turns to summer, the fertilized ovules will turn into singles, twins, and triplets of hazelnuts and as the warm days of summer lengthen, birds, squirrels, moles, and voles will gorge themselves on the nuts, the fats and proteins that used to feed my European forebears.
Dreams of past and future days abate and I walk on along Lagoon Drive beside the Pitch & Putt. I spy another shrub with small pink flowers; it is Viburnum x bodnantense. The five petals of its blossoms fuse together into small trumpets. For those of us who are keen to see the ornamental cherry trees in bloom, this hybrid is a welcome precursor.
I walk down a little path, away from the Ted and Mary Greig Rhododendron Garden toward Lost Lagoon. A twig covered in buds catches my eye (metaphorically). My mother used to cut something very similar from her garden and put it in a vase for the buds to leaf out and bring spring into our home. I focus my camera on the terminal buds of this twig, but a chestnut-backed chickadee lands, bouncing and blurring the twig. I focus again. He takes off and a Pacific wren lands. Two black squirrels run up expectantly, hoping to be fed. This time I focus the camera on the birds, which turns out to be just as hard as focussing on a twig. The results won’t win a photo contest.
As I walk on toward the plaza overlooking Lost Lagoon, near the old bus loop, I see a blaze of yellow ahead. It’s my favourite Chinese witch hazel, Hamamelis mollis, perhaps ‘Wisley Supreme’, judging by the colour and curl of its petals, with hints of red at their bases. It’s actually the later blooming of two such Chinese witch hazels near the staircase to the Lost Lagoon path. The earlier shrub started blooming sometime in November.
My favourite witch hazel is alive with yellow flowers, some of the most unusual flowers on any shrub.
I realize the importance of the binomial system of naming living things, because hazels and witch hazels seem to be related according to their common names. In fact, they are not. A common hazel is in the Corylus genus and the Betulaceae family, whereas witch hazels are in the Hamamelis genus and the Hamamelidaceae family. Their summer leaves do look rather similar though, often being obovate, both being simple and grooved, with hazel leaves being doubly serrate and witch hazel leaves having a wavy leaf margin. And both plants tend to sucker.
With hazels, you just have to remember which one is the witch!
Northeast of the Lord Stanley statue is another witch hazel. Its flowers are a deeper hue of yellow, less sunny than the ones beside Lost Lagoon, and its petals are straighter.
My purposeful walk continues and I remember a previous January when I met with a face full—a waterfall—of hazel catkins. I find the tree, just east of the Stanley Park pavilion. Today, the catkins at face level aren’t such a surprise!
And now I have one more witch hazel shrub to see. It grows on the north side of the Information Booth parking lot. The flowers are bright yellow, full of joy; the petals are long and curly and wild.
They are worth the wander.
I recall the way the leaves turn glowing purple, magentas, and orange-reds in late October.
I return home, fetch a grocery bag, and head to the mall. There, right beside the entrance,is a flowering, sweetly fragrant bush, Sarcococca hookeriana, sweetbox. So many flowers all in January, hinting at spring.
And now, in early February, I see constellations of snowdrops everywhere.
Text and Photos by Nina S., Vancouver Master Gardener
https://stanleyparkecology.ca/2019/09/04/herons-and-brews-mix-in-the-park/
