Beaked Hazelnut

Corylus cornuta

Betulaceae

• Eastern Washington Native
• Part shade preferred; tolerates full sun (with moisture) to fairly deep shade
• 8–15 ft tall × 8–12 ft wide (multi-stemmed)
• Drought Tolerant: Low to moderate — a woodland plant
• Flower Color: Showy creamy-yellow male catkins + tiny red female flowers, late winter to early spring (Feb–Mar)
• Fruit: Edible hazelnuts in a bristly beaked husk, ripening late summer-fall.
• Wildlife Benefits: Nuts feed squirrels, jays, grouse, deer & many species; thicket cover & nesting; moth/butterfly larval host; early pollen

Beaked hazelnut is a deciduous, multi-stemmed large shrub or small tree and native in eastern Washington. For the Spokane region the native form is ssp. cornuta. It is an early-successional, understory and forest-edge plant of thickets, openings, and rocky slopes and it is extraordinarily cold hardy. It grows best in moist but well-drained soil in part shade, though it tolerates full sun with adequate moisture as well as fairly deep shade; this is a woodland plant that wants more moisture and belongs in the moderate-water zones of a design. It has a shallow, dense root system with a modest taproot and often spreads by suckers to form thickets.

Beaked hazelnut offers two distinct seasons of gold. In late winter and early spring, well before the leaves emerge, long, creamy-yellow male catkins dangle from the bare stems and light up the landscape, while tiny, bright red female flowers cling like minute wisps along the twigs. The broad, rounded, doubly toothed, alder-like leaves follow and turn a clear yellow in fall. By late summer the pollinated female flowers develop into pairs of nuts, each wrapped in a bristly green husk shaped into a long tubular "beak". Growing as a rounded, open, vase-shaped shrub commonly 8 to 15 feet tall and 8 to 12 feet wide (and wider where it suckers freely), it can also be trained as an airy, open small tree.

This is a high-value wildlife plant. The edible nuts are a rich food source eagerly taken by squirrels, chipmunks, jays, woodpeckers, grouse, deer, and many other birds and mammals, so gardeners hoping to harvest their own hazelnuts must usually race the squirrels to them. The dense, thicket-forming growth provides excellent cover and nesting habitat, and the plant serves as a larval host for several moths and butterflies, while the early catkins offer some of the first pollen of the year. Beaked hazelnut is among the most culturally important plants of the Northwest and beyond: Indigenous peoples valued the nutritious nuts as food and trade goods, and prized the long, straight, flexible shoots, often encouraged by managed burning, for basketry, arrow shafts, fish traps, spits, cordage, and construction.  Corylus is not susceptible to the Eastern filbert blight that devastates orchard filberts.

Beaked hazelnut is a versatile native for hedgerows, screens, woodland and forest-edge plantings, wildlife and edible gardens, rain-garden and streamside edges, and naturalized thickets, or it can be limbed up as an open multi-stem specimen tree. Because it prefers moist, part-shade woodland conditions, site it with other forest-edge and understory natives rather than among dry xerics: serviceberry (Amelanchier alnifolia), red-osier dogwood (Cornus sericea), mock orange (Philadelphus lewisii), oceanspray (Holodiscus discolor), Rocky Mountain maple (Acer glabrum), snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus), and currants (Ribes), underplanted with ferns and shade perennials. Plant at least two shrubs, spaced roughly 10 to 20 feet apart, to improve wind pollination and nut set, and give it room to sucker, or manage the suckers if a tidier single specimen is wanted.