Hazel Flowers

March is the doldrums of the school year. Luckily, spring is springing hard (even though we haven't quite got to the equinox yet), and there is so much happening in the woods and in the garden. In both the woods and the garden, I love to look for small, strange, and wonderful things. Hazel flowers are small, strange, and wonderful things that mark the coming of spring. We saw the draping male flowers on Tiger Mountain a few weeks ago, but hadn't yet seen any of the tiny female flowers, in spite of some hard looking. Then we spotted some on a walk through our neighborhood last weekend. I'm not sure if the plants we found were our native beaked hazel, or a cultivated variety. They were growing in semi-maintained hedgerows. The male flowers are more familiar: long dangling catkins that exude pollen, like these.


If you look closely at the picture above, though, you can also spot the female flowers huddled close to the twigs. Here is a closer view of one.


They are a bright, clear magenta, but so tiny. What I first took for petals are actually styles, structures that connect the stigma (where pollen lands) to the flower's ovary. 



These last two photos were taken through a dissecting microscope at 20x. You can see the pollen on the styles. The fleshy flowers remind me of tiny sea anemones, or a star-nosed mole; more animal than plant. 

The strangeness of hazel flowers is a good reminder of the pleasure of looking closely. As I read recently in an A.S. Byatt story, "the world is full of light and life and the true crime is not to be interested in it." A good reminder on our slow turn back into the sunlight this time of year.


Location: Seattle, WA, USA

Comments

  1. Ethan SmithMarch 11, 2024 at 6:10 AM

    Is it just me or does that last photo look like a rooster?

    ReplyDelete

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