Whilst in Devon..

By TonyL

The female flowers have appeared at last..

The Hazel tree is monoecious, meaning that each tree has both male and female flowers. The red female flowers grow in clusters from small buds above the catkins.
Hazel is wind-pollinated and not reliant on insects so most of the pollen produced is blown away and doesn’t find it’s target. It can't self pollinate, so needs pollen from another tree.

Each catkin is a flower head, comprised of about 240 small flowers. Each flower is covered by a triangular downy bract, beneath the bract are four stamens and each stamen has two yellow anthers (the pollen producing male part of a flower).

A single anther will produce around nine thousand grains of pollen and ONE CATKIN, nearly NINE MILLION.

A Hazel tree produces a lot of pollen, and plenty of hazel nuts later in the year.

I hope you can remember all this as there will be questions later.

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