THE HAZEL.
“Now let us sit beneath the grateful shade
Which Hazels interlaced with elms have made.”
Virgil, Eclogue V.
The Hazel, under which Menalcas invites his brother-shepherd to sit, is a tree of considerable size, while the American hazels are mere shrubs, seldom overtopping a rustic stone-wall. The Hazel among the Romans, like the olive among the Jews, was regarded as the emblem of peace; and this estimation of it was transmitted to the people of a later period. Hence, in popular works of fancy on the language of flowers, this is recorded as its symbolic meaning; and in ancient times a Hazel rod was supposed to have power of reconciling friends who had been separated by disagreement. These superstitions connected with the Hazel, and more particularly the one relating to the Hazel rod, named the Caduceus, assigned by the gods to Mercury as a means of restoring harmony to the human race, probably gave origin to the divining-rod, which was first made of Hazel and afterwards of the witch-elm. It is remarkable that in America this use was made of the hamamelis, a very different plant in its botanical characters, and hence called the Witch-Hazel.
There are two New England species, both delighting in the shelter of rude fences, and producing their flowers before their leaves. They are distinguished chiefly by the shape of their fruit. The common Hazel is the one most generally known. In this the shells or husks that enclose the nuts are of the same round shape, growing in a cluster, and each invested with a calyx like that of an ordinary flower. The Beaked Hazel is a smaller bush and frequents more solitary places than the other. “The calyx enclosing the nut, densely hispid and round at base, is contracted like a bottle into a long narrow neck, which is cut and toothed at the extremity.” The whole nut with its envelope resembles a bird’s head and beak. A dry sandy loam is the soil generally occupied by the Hazel. Along the old roads that pass over dry sandy plains, that border many of the river-banks in the Northern States, the Hazel, growing in frequent clumps, forms in some of these locations the most common kind of shrubbery. When we see a pitch-pine wood on one side of a road, the cultivated land on the opposite side is usually bordered with a growth of Hazels.
Both species are particularly worthy of protection and preservation. They produce a valuable nut without our care; they are ornamental to our fields and by-roads; they feed the squirrels and shelter the birds, and they add a lively interest to natural objects by their spontaneous products. The Hazel is associated with many pleasant adventures in our early days, with nut-gatherings and squirrel-hunts, and with many pleasant incidents in classical poetry. The Hazel has been a favorite theme of poets, especially those of the Middle Ages. In the songs of that period are constant allusions to the Hazel-bush, probably from its frequency in natural hedge-rows, and its valuable fruit.