History of Rare Plants

Hazel.

C. avellana, L n. cap. 448

A woodcut illustration of a Turkish hazel branch (Corylus colurna) featuring broad, heart-shaped leaves with serrated margins. At the center of the foliage is a cluster of nuts encased in deeply fringed, spiny involucres (husks). A single, oval hazelnut is depicted separately to the right of the main stem.

A large botanical woodcut showing a hazel branch with several broad leaves and a prominent, intricately fringed husk containing nuts. Below the branch, three individual hazelnuts are shown from different angles to illustrate their shape and attachment points.

Dwarf Byzantine Hazel.

Corylus Colurna. L. p. 1417.
Miller dict.
Spec. hist.
n. cap. 448
Lam: h. 496

Detailed woodcut illustrations of the husks (calyces) of the Byzantine hazel nut. The upper image shows a dense cluster of several husks, while the lower image shows a single husk, both emphasizing their characteristic twisted and laciniated (fringed) structure.

History of the Byzantine Hazel.

It was brought from Constantinople first, and then again four years later, along with various kinds of bulbous plants, through the care of the Magnificent and Noble Lord David Ungnad, Baron of Sonneck, President of the War Council in Austria, who affirmed to me that it was a delight to the Emperor of the Turks and his nobles.

Furthermore, its shrub, by his account, rarely grows above a cubit in height, but always remains dwarf: bearing on thin stalks very thick and large husks, callous and hard, sometimes solitary, sometimes several clinging together on the same stalk, like the common kind, divided at the extremity into many thick and long fringes, the base also being beset with many fringed appendages: indeed, these husks are hirsute on the outside with a very hard and rough down, but smooth on the inside, containing a fruit almost like the wild and naturally occurring Hazel, or somewhat shorter, consisting of a hard shell like those, which contains a similar kernel; which I could not observe at first, because I could only obtain a single fruit, such as I then depicted in the History of Pannonian Plants: afterwards, however, when more had been obtained, and I had received several from him, both enclosed in their husks and removed, I not only wished to taste them, but also committed them to the earth in earthen pots—not with their husk, as had been previously indicated to me, but naked: and those indeed sprouted only in the second year from sowing, and grew into a single shoot a foot long, which without