Lady hazel

Another early blip today, as we're all going out for a Thai meal tonight. Once again I spent most of the day working, which meant another dusk walk under rather dull grey skies. Although there's still a lot of flooding in the valley, Rosie and I managed to do a circuit on the north side of the Rowing Lake, though I did get wet feet on the one remaining stretch of flooded path. But the world is beginning to sound like spring now, with robins, great tits and blue tits all calling, and the first song thrushes of the year engaged in an auditory battle.

Those harbingers of spring, the hazel catkins, have been out since before Christmas in sheltered south-facing spots, but now the easily overlooked female flowers have also emerged. These are about as pared down as a flower can get, consisting of a bunch of red stigmas no more than 4mm in length, and looking almost like a stranded sea-anemone. The stigmas are textured and sticky, to catch the golden wind-blown pollen of the male catkins, which can be seen in this macro. Once pollinated, the fruit will gradually swell and harden, producing the familiar hazelnut by autumn.

Hazels are important trees in Celtic mythology. The Celts equated hazelnuts with concentrated wisdom and poetic inspiration, as is suggested by the similarity between the Gaelic word for these nuts, cno, and the word for wisdom, cnocach. There are several variations on an ancient tale that nine hazel trees grew around a sacred pool, dropping nuts into the water to be eaten by some salmon (a fish revered by Druids) which thereby absorbed the wisdom. The number of bright spots on the salmon were said to indicate how many nuts they had eaten.

In an Irish variation of this legend, one salmon was the recipient of all these magical nuts. A Druid master, in his bid to become all-knowing, caught the salmon and instructed his pupil to cook the fish but not to eat any of it. However in the process, hot juice from the cooking fish spattered onto the apprentice's thumb, which he instinctively thrust into his mouth to cool, thereby imbibing the fish's wisdom. This lad was called Fionn Mac Cumhail and went on to become one of the most heroic leaders in Irish mythology.