Cobnut cornucopia

Perusing the Daily Telegraph website's always interesting "earth" section revealed a rather interesting article on cobnuts. Apparently this year is a bumper year for cobnuts with a harvest nearly 3 times the scale usually expected. That got me to thinking and as a result I'm bumping up a post I was saving for a later date. Cob is the old english name for the nuts of the hazel (Corylus avellana) and filbert (Corylus maxima). Our Corylus were certainly producing well earlier this year. This is a bog standard Corylus avellana in the hedge.

You can't really tell from this photo but this is something a little different; Corylus avellana aurea, the golden hazel. It is a buttery yellow in life but ours is a little greenish as a result of being in some shade. You can tell this is a true hazel by the short sheath around the nut.

Which is in sharp contrast to the long sheaths below. These indicate a filbert (Corylus maxima). In this case this is the purple cultivar, Red Zellernus. I'd really like to get a nut bowl full of red and gold nuts from these two some day if we can beat the small rodents and birds to them.

The plant below is something that absolutely wouldn't have featured in a Kentish platte as described in the above article.

Corylus colurna, the Turkish hazel forms a conical tree bigger than a normal hazel and is just one of many other species worldwide. Ours is the cultivar Te Terra Red, which again produces red leaves and nuts. You can see the sheaths on these are rather different to those shown above too. I'm expecting them to be just as delicious nonetheless.