Common hazel

Corylus silvestris - Common Hazel

A humble inhabitant of Europe's woods and hedges, the Common Hazel embodies everyday botany, the kind intimately known by shepherds and children.

Pierre-Antoine Poiteau lovingly recounts this familiarity: in 19th-century England, entire families lived by gathering wild hazelnuts in autumn, which they sold in London's markets. A popular way of life, now vanished, is captured in this plate with the same precision as the most aristocratic species.

Extremely common around Paris, the Hazel becomes "a medium-sized tree" in the cool, light soils of Meudon wood or Saint-Cloud park, sometimes reaching 3 decimeters in diameter.

Its brown and shiny bark, its slightly hairy, tawny young buds, its rounded, heart-shaped leaves, finely toothed and deeply veined, compose a botanical ensemble of great elegance.

As early as February, well before the leaves, sulfur-yellow male catkins, 8 centimeters long, appear, while the female buds are recognizable by their small red tuft.

The hazelnuts, oval or oblong, ripen in August within a deeply cut involucre. Poiteau insists: fresh, they only yield to cultivated filberts in their modest size, but their flavor deserves much more than indifference.

This plate is taken from Pierre-Antoine Poiteau and Pierre Jean François Turpin's Traité des Arbres Fruitiers (Treatise on Fruit Trees), a botanical encyclopedia published between 1807 and 1835, a major reference for 19th-century naturalist illustration.

It combines the rigor of scientific drawing with a rare artistic sensibility, characteristic of the great plates from the golden age of illustrated botany.