Hazel (Corylus avellana): how to identify it

Hazel through the year

• Late winter (February–March): yellow catkins on bare twigs, red female flowers beside them. Trees for Life counts the catkins among the first signs of spring in the forest.
• Spring: leaves open after the catkins; until then the leaf buds are oval, blunt and hairy.
• Summer: round, soft leaves; young nuts form in their green husks. This is the season for confusion with elm, hornbeam and lime, below.
• Autumn (September–October): nuts turn brown and fall; leaves turn yellow. Small green catkins for next year are already visible.
• Winter: smooth grey-brown bark, bendy hairy twigs and the many-stemmed outline. Our winter tree identification guide covers reading buds.

The nuts are eaten by dormice, woodpeckers, nuthatches, jays, wood pigeons and small mammals, according to the Woodland Trust, and Trees for Life adds that red squirrels and rodents spread them by hoarding nuts they then forget. Hazel nuts are also the ones sold as hazelnuts, and cobnuts are a cultivated variety grown in Kent. This page does not cover foraging.

Coppicing: why hazel looks like a ring of poles

Many hazels you meet have been coppiced. The National Trust describes coppicing as felling trees at the base to create a stool from which new shoots grow, a technique that dates back to the Stone Age. It says hazel is usually coppiced on an eight-year cycle, against 15 to 20 years for sweet chestnut. Cutting opens the wood to light, which benefits many plants and animals, dormice among them.

That is why a coppiced hazel looks like a fan of straight, similar-sized poles springing from one low stump. Trees for Life notes the stool can reach 2 m across, and that while uncut hazel lives about 50 to 70 years, coppiced hazel can live for several hundred. The Woodland Trust lists the poles' uses as pea sticks and bean poles, and historically thatching spars, hurdles and furniture. An overgrown coppice, with thick stems from a wide base, still shows the pattern.

Where hazel grows: in Britain, in the understorey of lowland oak, ash or birch woods, in scrub and in hedgerows (Woodland Trust). Trees for Life records it throughout Scotland, including the Outer Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland, common in the western Highlands and forming nearly pure stands in Argyll. It is on the Woodland Trust's list of UK native trees.

Hazel look-alikes: alder, hornbeam, elm and lime

In leaf, without catkins or nuts, four trees can pass for hazel.

Alder. Alder also hangs catkins in late winter, but its leaf is different: the Woodland Trust says the tip is never pointed and is often indented, the leaves are leathery, and the buds are purple or grey on long stalks. Alder keeps small woody cones on its branches through winter, and it grows by rivers, ponds and lakes. See alder.

Hornbeam. Hornbeam leaves are oval with pointed tips and finely toothed, with a pleated look, shaped like a small beech leaf rather than hazel's round outline. Its fruit is a small nut held in a leafy, three-lobed bract, with papery wings, not a hazelnut in a husk. Hornbeam usually grows into a single-trunked tree with pale grey bark. Beech vs hornbeam has the full description.

Wych elm and English elm. The Woodland Trust's wych elm profile gives leaves 7–16 cm long, rough to the touch on the upper surface, with a characteristic asymmetrical base. The Woodland Trust's hazel page names English elm as hazel's look-alike for the same reasons: elm leaves are roughly hairy where hazel's are soft, and lopsided at the base. Run a finger over the leaf: sandpaper means elm. See elm.

Lime. Small-leaved lime leaves are heart-shaped with a pointed tip, 3–8 cm long, and hairless underneath except for reddish-brown tufts where the veins join. Hazel leaves are hairy all over underneath and doubly toothed. Limes grow as tall single-trunked trees. See lime (linden).

American hazelnut and beaked hazel

North America has its own hazels, which grow as shrubs rather than trees. American hazelnut (Corylus americana) grows 6 to 10 ft (about 2–3 m) high as an understorey shrub and along wood edges in eastern North America and Canada, according to the Morton Arboretum, with yellow catkins, tiny pink female flowers, ovate to heart-shaped toothed leaves and nuts in a frilly husk ripening in September and October. Beaked hazel (Corylus cornuta) is a suckering shrub, often in clumps about 6 ft (1.8 m) high, with doubly serrated leaves 2 to 4 in (5–10 cm) long; Virginia Tech Dendrology singles out its bristly husk drawn out into a long, tube-like beak, which American hazelnut lacks. To place a North American hazel, check the husk: frilly is American hazelnut, drawn into a long beak is beaked hazel, and a short leafy husk covering three-quarters of the nut matches the European description above.