Hazel

The hazel, Corylus avellana, is a shrubby nut-tree of European hedgerow and woodland, and in Irish tradition it is the tree of concentrated wisdom. Nine hazels are said to grow around a sacred well (the Well of Segais or Connla's Well), dropping their nuts into the water where the Salmon of Knowledge eats them and so takes in all the wisdom of the world; the hero Fionn mac Cumhaill acquires that knowledge by accident, burning his thumb on the cooking salmon and sucking it. The hazelnut, compact and nourishing and long-storable, is a fitting emblem for wisdom gathered into a small hard shell.

Hazel has a long practical history in English woodland management distinct from its wisdom-lore: coppiced hazel, cut back to a stump every seven to ten years to send up a fresh crop of straight poles, supplied the wattle for wattle-and-daub building, hurdles for fencing sheep folds, and pea-sticks for the garden, a sustainable harvesting method that also, as a side effect, creates the open, sunlit woodland floor that supports Britain's richest woodland flora, so traditional coppicing and biodiversity turn out to depend on each other. Hazel carries a separate, more recent piece of British folk practice: a forked hazel rod is the traditional tool of dowsing, or water-witching, held to bend or twitch in the hand when passing over hidden underground water, a folk technique quite distinct from the older Irish lore of wisdom-bearing hazelnuts recorded above.

The hazel is the classic wood of the divining or dowsing rod: a forked hazel twig, held under tension, was and in places still is used to search for water, metal or lost objects, twitching downward over the find. The practice is old and geographically wide, and it is folk divination rather than anything with a demonstrated physical basis, the movement now generally explained as the involuntary ideomotor effect. In the wider European tradition the hazel is a tree of protection, fertility and knowledge, its rods cut for wands and its nuts used in love-divination at Samhain and Halloween. The plant's associations cluster consistently around wisdom, hidden knowledge and the finding of what is concealed.

Kent in south-east England developed its own commercial hazel tradition distinct from any magical use: the Kentish cobnut, a large-fruited cultivated hazel variety, has been grown as an orchard crop there since at least the nineteenth century, traditionally harvested green in late summer around the old Cob Nut Day, 5 August, old Lammas Day kept nine days later than the modern calendar, a harvest custom that persists in a much reduced way today alongside the older wisdom and dowsing lore recorded above.