Hazel

corylus avellana

Author: Linné, Family: corylaceae

The hazelbush was an important plant in the Celtic calendar of trees. In the mesolithicum, after the Ice Age, it was more widespread than today, later being superseded by the oak.
Hazelnuts have probably been eaten by people since very old time, but the bush never has been cultivated in the true sense.

Photo by Brother Alfred Brousseau, St. Mary's College
(The photo shows corylus cornuta var. californica, the California hazelnut. The European species is roundish and doesn't have the little 'horn' at the top.)

Text References: Food
CB 10, 151	(...) a large spring gushing out of the side of a rock wall near a large hazelnut clump growing flush against the rock.
CB 10, 163	(...) and climbed to her hidden clearing once more, planning to collect hazelnuts.
CB 10, 152	Ayla (...) stopped to examine the still unripe double and triple clusters of nuts encased in their green, prickly coverings. She picked a clump, peeled away the casing, and cracked the soft shell with her teeth, exposing a shiny white half-grown nut. She always liked unripe hazelnuts better than fully mature ones that had dropped to the ground. The taste aroused her appetite and she began to pick several clusters and put them into her basket.
CB 12, 195	(...) Ayla decided to climb to the high pasture to collect the mature hazelnuts that had fallen to the ground.
CB 16, 258	Ayla's Cave I am hungry, I wish there was something to eat around here. Wait! There is! I didn't collect the nuts this year, they should be all over the ground outside. (...) She gathered the nuts, brought them into the cave, and ate as many as her stomach, shrunken from lack of food, could hold.
CB 16, 259-260	Ayla's cave, death curse In the immediate vicinity were also nuts, high-//bush cranberries, bearberries, hard small apples, starchy potatolike roots, and edible ferns.
VH 1, 10-11	She added some strips of dried // meat (...) a few dried apples, some hazelnuts, a few pouches of grain plucked from the grasses of the steppes near the cave, and threw away a rotten root.
VH 5, 79	She was making a storage container, thinking about everything she had to do to make herself secure for the cold season ahead. (...) I think those were hazelnut bushes by the apple tree, but they're so much smaller than the ones by the little cave, I'm not sure.
PP 8, 118-119	Traveling Provisions She took out all the various kinds of dried preserved food she had brought with them and spread it out on top of their sleeping roll. (...) There also were grains and seeds, some that had been partially cooked and then parched; some shelled and roasted hazelnuts; and the stone-pine cones full of rich nuts she had collected from the valley the day before.
PP 13, 210-211	A mixed stand of majestic elms, // elegant birches, and fragrant lindens marching up a hillside, overshadowed a thicket of edibles that they stopped to gather: raspberries, nettles, hazel brush with not-quite-ripe hazelnuts, just the way Ayla liked them, and a few stone pines bearing rich, hard-shelled pine nuts within their cones.
PP 14, 237	When she saw hazelnuts, still on the tree in their green prickly casings, but nearly ripe, the way she liked them, she had to stop and pick some.
PP 17, 295	She stopped to pick a few hazelnuts off a bush growing against a rock wall, (...)

	Abbreviations	Editions
CB	The Clan of the Cave Bear	The page numbers refer to the hardcover editions by Crown Publishers, Inc, New York 1980, 1982, 1985, 1990. Book 1-3 are the Special Collector's Edition, I don't know if the page numbers differ from those of the 'normal' hardcover editions.
VH	The Valley of Horses
MH	The Mammoth Hunters
PP	The Plains of Passage
(...)	omission	Copyright
...	original in text	All book quotes: © Copyright Jean M. Auel The format and text contents of this site are the property of the author
MGMH	'A Modern Herbal', by Mrs. M. Grieve

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Hazel

corylus avellana

Text References: Food