Fine catkins

This week's genus, Corylus, has been eradicated from our garden as too boisterous, but fortunately there's one to admire just a couple of metres over the back boundary:

After close attention to the twigs in the image above you will rightly guess that this is a corkscrew hazel, the cultivar 'Contorta'. Its fine catkins show up before the spring foliage appears.

Our photographer carefully angled the shot to also include the neighbour's full-sized Corylus avellana, which has catkins of a much browner color.

The main species, also known in English as the European filbert, grows into a 6-metre tree, but Contorta usually minds its place. The catkins are a nuisance to us allergy sufferers, but one tree more or less makes no difference among the millions of hazels flourishing in northern Europe.

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