There have been some fine displays of catkins in hedgerows here, but none compares with the corkscrew hazel flowering outside my window. It’s a mutant form of native hazel, with a compact canopy of sinuous branches that have lost all sense of direction: they spiral, twist, curl, bend and sometimes double back on themselves. For the last two weeks, they have been smothered in a curtain of long golden catkins. This afternoon, tree sparrows are using the tree as a staging post, en route to the bird feeders. When they land the catkins dance, shedding ephemeral, will-o’-the-wisp clouds of golden pollen.
Corkscrew hazel is horticultural Marmite: some gardeners love its sculptural quality in winter, especially when it is iced with a light fall of snow; others dislike its grotesquely distorted, dark green, hispid summer foliage. But it has a story to tell that is as convoluted as its limbs. It might have languished unnoticed in a hedgerow, but for a passerby with an eye for the unusual, a generous vicar-botanist, a music hall celebrity and generations of gardeners skilled in the ancient art of grafting.
Some credit its discovery, in a Gloucestershire hedgerow 160 years ago, to the earl of Ducie; others suspect that a tenant found it and passed it to Ducie’s gardener, who gave a cutting to the green-fingered Canon Henry Ellacombe, an eminent plant collector who distributed it among the Victorian gardening elite. It might have remained a conversation piece in their arboreta but for its appearance on a music hall stage.
Enter, Sir Harry Lauder, Scottish vaudeville superstar, carrying a wonky walking stick made from a corkscrew hazel branch. A household name, the highest paid entertainer in the world, the first British recording artist to sell one million records, with the kind of reach that today’s social media influencers dream about. After he used it in his act as a theatrical prop, the tree that botanical cognoscenti called Corylus avellana ‘Contorta’ became Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick.
There are thousands of corkscrew hazels in gardens today. The mutation is not passed on through the seeds, so they can only be propagated by grafting scions – clones of that original hedgerow tree – on to wild hazel rootstocks.
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