Nutty is nice at the Clover Park Technical College Outdoor Lab

By Marcia Wilson

The Western Beaked Hazelnuts are beginning to bloom. This yearly event is hailed with delight by Western Washington’s pollinators, foragers, birds, and their birdwatchers. This handsome shrub thrives in the ecological belts between forest and field, with each season producing its own unique beauty.  Welcome to winter, the Cornus Cornuta var. Californica.

Also known as:

• q’ap’ux̌ʷac, q’p’ux̌ʷəc (BHH) in the Puyallup language
• q̓ap̓ux̌ʷ , Lushootseed
• Beaked Filbert
• California Hazelnut
• Turkish Filbert or Hazelnut

It’s a unicorn

The cornus means “horn” and comes from the same root from where we get the word unicorn–uni meaning “one” and corn meaning “horn”.

Beaked Hazelnut is a delight in the wild as much as in suburbia’s backyards. The slim, toast-brown trunks and branches gently twist upwards to reach the sun beneath the canopies of Bigleaf maple and other hardwoods.  The leaves are soft and furry with jagged edges designed to catch dew and rain.   In winter their thickets are filled with birds seeking shelter and a safe place to eat.  The ripe nuts are small and tasty, full of protein and oil.

January through to spring is the best time to look for these shrubs, when long chains of golden-yellow catkins hang from the branches. Catkins are male or unisex flowers full of rich yellow pollen, all to fertilize a rose-pink female flower so small, it can barely be seen by the human eye.

Welcome to the table

Beaked hazelnuts are as ornamental as they are edible, which puts them in a new pop culture category of edimental.  This is a portmanteau of edible+ornamental and was coined by botanist Stephen Barstow. The word is a little more than 10 years old but is gaining traction in the language of plant-lovers.  In areas where ornamental plants are allowed but not fruits and vegetables, sneaky residents find loopholes with flora that is pretty first, with its edibility listed as a secondary property.

On this day, two years ago…

Dr. Faust made a short clip on the Beaked hazelnut on his Plant Speed Dating series last year. In fact, he made his presentation just behind the site from the blog article written two years ago, Look Owl For Falling Sticks!  Where there are food-bearing plants, there will also be prey.  Following prey is the predator, such as the Great Horned Owls perched on the trail. Before they moved on, multiple owl species were recorded on this hazelnut trail. 

Cultural value

There are two species of Beaked Hazelnut in North America. The Eastern species is small, at about 20’ tall with large nuts.  It is spread from the Eastern Seaboard all the way to Eastern Washington.  The Western species is over twice as tall as the Eastern, with smaller nuts.  Both cross with each other, creating hybrids that possess the qualities of both parents.

Ecological treasure

These native shrubs add to the resiliency of other trees. They can handle harsh drought, yet they also like damp soil and are useful in controlling erosion along the streambanks.  Their hardiness is not limited to freshwater.  Large, healthy shrubs have been found within the salt-spray zone of Puget Sound.

Fire doesn’t kill them

Hazelnuts survive wildfires and storms that can destroy other shrubs and trees.  Controlled burns only encourages hazelnuts to grow. They can be scorched down to the ground, only for the roots to produce strong shoots in a year or two.  These limber twigs were valuable for making tools, tent-poles, baskets and fishing utilities. 

Often called “wild hazelnuts” they were a vital forage food for the Indigenous cultures.  The settlers who followed them had a large knowledge base on hazels from Europe and Asia.  Hazel coppices, or carefully tended “forest farms” could last for hundreds of years, and archeological evidence has proven Mesolithic humans spread native hazels across their world as soon as the glaciers retreated.  

Where does Filbert come in?

Hazel was known as a male name up until about the time of the American Civil War, and its popularity comes and goes, but it remains a name for the eye color, which is one of the more difficult colors to describe. A hazelnut on the cusp of transitioning from green to ripe is a popular definition.

Hazelnuts are also called filberts, but why?  Filbert actually means hazel, but in a convoluted way. There was a 7^th-century Frankish Abbot named Philbert, who became a saint.  Saint Philbert’s feast day coincided when the hazelnuts ripened, so in the Norman language, “nuts of Filbert”, noix de Philbert, spread into the English language.

Hazelnuts were so deeply entrenched in the Western world that children were given a day off from school to harvest nuts and Halloween wasn’t complete without a feast of toasted hazelnuts.  It was undoubtedly the “treat” part, for any shenanigans were punished by the limber switches cut off the hazelnut branches.  Hassel and heckle may be related to the word hazel!

A future delight?

Beaked Hazelnuts are one of the many native species on the CPTC Outdoor Lab.  They feed over fifty species of birds, insects, and animals. The college would warn the curious not to get their hopes up on tasting this native nut.  The wildlife is very successful in beating humans to the harvest.  Let them have their food.  In ten to twenty years this native treat may be on the market, or at least its hybrid.  It has proven itself a fighter against the Eastern Filbert blight, a crippling disease affecting our crops.  Perhaps the solution for nut farmers is already here, in our own back yard.