On Optimism and Hazelnuts
The second part of the series on perennial agriculture.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-treeNot known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.— TS Eliot, Little Gidding
I am not an optimist by nature. Neither, it seems, was TS Eliot, who viewed Western civilization as a beast that had been dying for several hundred years. But salvation bleeds everywhere through his poetry. It might just be his Anglican sensibility, but I’m not so sure. That seems too simple.
Little Gidding, written in 1942 while bombs rained down on England, ends in humanity stumbling through the gauntlet of progress back into Eden, or something like it. More or less the same place as before, but seen through a different lens, with subject and object collapsed. Where the separation between person and world shrinks because the person depends on the world.
Of course he does mention that it will cost not less than everything. Eliot saw dark ages on the horizon. To most a dark age implies fear and famine, a gang of brutes knocking down the door to steal the last of your grain and your scrawny donkey. But at its core a dark age is only an opaque stretch of unrecorded history. It might just as well be a period of rest between seething empires, when the machine quiets down and humanity can begin being human again. No Roman legions, no pharaohs, no grand inquisitors.
At three different points in the poem Eliot proclaims that All shall be well. He borrowed the phrase from Julian of Norwich, who borrowed it from God.
Forged in the not-so-good kind of dark ages, in the sweep of the Black Death and the Peasant’s Revolt that engulfed England in the latter half of the 14th century, Julian’s mysticism arose amidst the crumbling of the world at large as well as her personal world. Struck by a sudden illness at age thirty and near death, she had visions of the divine while her eyesight faded and numbness crept through her body. Later that week she recovered completely.
Eventually Julian became a anchoress, sealed up in a dim cell in the heart of the city where she meditated and wrote about her experience. Outside the walls the Hundred Years War continued to rage through Europe, no one agreed on which pope was the real pope, and right down the road proto-reformist Lollards1 burned at the stake. But the plague and war and collapse of shared reality that colored the times didn’t seem to affect her.
At one point in the revelations God places a hazelnut in her hand. When she asks what it means, he responds, it is all that is made.2
I’ve thought about this phrase a lot, because it feels profound but I can’t quite put my finger on why. I think it’s got something to do with the wonder involved in watching natural cycles continue to unfold in the increasing insanity of the man-made world. Might be that Julian was commenting on a shrub that’s kept humans alive since our earliest days — its roasted shells are among the primary scraps found in middens of the late Mesolithic — and may be one of our saving graces in the decades to come. Could be something about the mind-boggling ecosystem-raising potential energy that exists in a single shell.
Anyhow, as war again slouches towards Europe and the poles of our collective epistemology stretch further apart, as broken young men gun down children at school and the price of energy clambers further up its hockey-stick shaped ladder and the cracks in the stuccoed edifice of society start to widen, I focus on hazelnuts. Maybe that’s the point — attending to growing things sidesteps a need for optimism. Attention, and effort.
Soon we’ll find land, sink roots, and plant a forest of nut trees.
Herds of mastodon once thundered across the primeval Pleistocene landscape munching hazelnuts and feasting on the woody browse — they leaf out and flower early while the rest of the forest sleeps, helping nudge bees and other animals across the hunger gap of late winter. But as humans go, so goes the hazel. Twelve thousand years ago as the earth warmed Homo sapiens followed hot on the heels of melting glaciers, bringing the seed of their preferred plants to newly temperate lands. By this method the humble shrub weaseled into every nook in Europe and into the corners of its folklore.
In Celtic legend hazels lingered at the edge of the spiritual world. Nine sprawled over the Well of Wisdom, where spotted salmon swam and gobbled the nuts that dropped, gaining wisdom and spots in proportion to the amount they ate. After years of trying, the Druid master Finegas finally caught one and directed his apprentice Fionn mac Cumhaill3 to cook but not eat a single morsel from it. As Fionn fried up the hazel-wise fish a bit of fat splattered and burned his thumb and sagacity drenched through him as without thinking he jabbed his thumb into his mouth to cool the pain. Poor old Finegas saw this and understood its consequence. He told Fionn to eat the rest of the salmon, and the boy went on to become the storied leader of the Fianna, a mythic band of warriors who fought with hazel staffs and shields.
The Norse called the glorified bush Tree of Life, beloved of Thor. The Chinese revered it as one of the five sacred fruits. Famed scholars of antiquity ascribed a questionable bundle of medicinal uses to the nuts, from curing coughs and colds to, as Avicenna claimed, bolstering male fertility. The Greek physician Discorides insisted one could cure baldness by mashing burnt filbert4 shells into lamb fat and rubbing it on troublesome spots.5 He’s said to have tried the concoction on himself, and it’s hard to argue with the guy after seeing a drawing of his luscious locks.
Always associated with life and rebirth, in the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella the girl plants a hazel tree at her mother’s grave and waters it with her tears. Rather than a bumbling fairy godmother of the Disney variety materializing, in response to her desperation the tree itself rains down gifts (with the help of a couple pigeons). The story pulls no punches — later the evil stepsisters each cut off their big toe and a chunk of heel to fit into the golden slipper, while the pigeons cry Rook di goo, rook di goo, there’s blood in the shoe!
The exalted place of hazel in myth speaks to its importance — its uses were myriad. Though a short lived plant if left to its own devices and undisturbed, it can live a thousand years if burned or cut to the ground regularly. Coppicing causes the new growth to run long and straight for baskets, staffs, or fishing rods. The shoots can be bent and woven into hurdles to make portable wattle fences, or shaped into large staples for securing a thatched roof. Diviners used forked rods to dowse for water.
Dense and fatty and infinitely malleable, hazelnuts have the potential to evolve beyond a dessert food and become a modern staple (by this I do not mean making Nutella sandwiches, which are a horrifying monstrosity). They could effectively replace soybeans and transform vast swathes of agricultural desert into perennial polycultures in the process. While established markets don’t exist yet beyond snacks, soybeans found themselves in a similar place a hundred years ago and have now wormed their way into a dizzying array of processed foods and industrial products.
Anything soybeans can do hazelnuts do better. They can be pressed into a high-quality oil, and the protein-rich cake left behind used as animal feed. Nuts that don’t meet food-grade standards can be diverted to biodiesel production, generating double the fuel per acre compared to soybeans.6 The shells burn hot as coal, produce a fantastic charcoal that can bind certain heavy metals, have been used as the base for particleboard and abrasives in beauty products, and make a pretty, slow to decompose mulch.
Unfortunately, most hazelnut orchards today consist of high-input monocultures that heavily utilize synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. To increase harvest efficiency producers train the naturally multi-stemmed shrubs into single-trunked small trees and kill any and all vegetation under them. Large machines trundle beneath and sweep fallen nuts into the rows for other machines to scoop up.
While the majority of hazelnut exports come from Turkey, nearly all US production takes place in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, with its cool temperate climate moderated by the Pacific. As a nut evangelist (never thought I’d call myself a nut evangelist, but here we are) in the process of moving there, it seemed obvious that hazels would play a major role in our planned forest farm. There they’d serve as an understory shrub amid chestnuts and grapes and apples, line hedgerows and dot edges.
Then I got a little context. While North America has two native hazel species (Corylus americana and Corylus cornuta), all the varieties grown commercially are of European origin (Corylus avellana). The native species hosts a fungal pathogen known as Eastern Filbert Blight7, which it’s evolved to live with. In contrast European hazels, unaccustomed to the disease, die a slow death once infected. For a century growers in the Pacific Northwest paid little attention to the blight, as it remained confined to the eastern half of the country. But it slowly sauntered across the plains, wound up in Washington in the 1960s and landed in the Willamette Valley in the late 90s, where it ran wild and in many cases forced farmers to bulldoze entire fields of languishing hazels. Oregon State has attempted to breed blight-resistant cultivars with limited success8, but this exemplifies the fragility inherent in clonal monocultures.9 Some pest or disease finds a weak spot and ploof, you’re toast.
The future belongs to genetic diversity. No one has done more to further the resilience of nut trees than Philip Rutter, an evolutionary ecologist in Minnesota who has spent the past forty years working to breed hazel, chestnut, and hickory-pecan hybrids into staple food crops. In the case of hazelnuts, Rutter continuously crosses the two North American species with the European, selecting across multiple generations for traits like nut size and volume, resistance to EFB, and cold hardiness. While still a work in progress, his neohybrid10 hazels have landed on a degree of stability in the gene pool — meaning to a large extent key traits in offspring plants are predictable.11
Naturally an ecologically minded grower would default to planting neohybrids — the obstacle is that Oregon, as the country’s largest producer with an image to protect (the hazelnut is the state nut), keeps the industry on a tight leash. This means restrictions on the cultivars farmers can grow and the states they can import seedlings from12, and translates to a complete inability to access the genetics that Rutter has established. I don’t know of anyone in Oregon growing hazels the way I’d like to grow them.
So the choice seems to fall between working within the varietal constraints passed down from on high or attempting to breed your own. While creating locally adapted land races of annual crops is theoretically straightforward — save seed from the best plants, then do it over and over13 — incorporating the best traits of three separate species of a woody perennial is a different ballgame. It involves a whole mess of additional variables and at minimum a five year wait before you have any idea what kind of nut will present itself. And that doesn’t take into account other attributes, like how well the plant springs back from a coppice cycle, or its resistance to blight, which might take twenty years to manifest. This is the long game. It’s daunting, especially if your genetic knowledge mostly consists of messy Punnett squares from ten years ago.
At another point in Little Gidding, Eliot describes a pilgrim’s journey to the 17th century religious community for which the poem is named.
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone.
And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all.
Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment…
Aside from the nicely-placed nut metaphor, the point here is that none of this business will shake down like the vision in my head. That is not the nature of grand plans, or farms, or pilgrimages. And starting a farm is more or less a pilgrimage, albeit one without a clearly defined route, a search for some patch of soil where the the physical terrain connects to the spiritual, where the geography is transformative. Best not to get ahead of myself and agonize over where hazels fit into the scheme. The land itself will decide that, and will hopefully call out some failure of imagination in my plans thus far.
Come to think of it, starting a farm also requires a healthy bit of unreasonable confidence. If you weren’t feeling generous, you might call it manic impulse or delusion. Rose-colored glasses either way. So maybe I’m an optimist after all.
The Lollards were followers of John Wycliffe who opposed many of the teachings of the Catholic Church. The movement was in many ways a precursor to the Protestant Reformation.
...he showed a little thing the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand as it seemed to me, and it was as round as any ball. I looked therein with the eye of my understanding, and thought: “What may this be?” And it was answered generally thus: “It is all that is made.”
Pronounced Finn McCool.
What’s the difference between a filbert and a hazelnut? The terms are basically interchangeable, for both the tree and the nut. Filbert comes from the French, while hazelnut comes from the English.
It cures chronic coughing if pounded filbert is eaten with honey. Cooked filbert mixed with black pepper cures the cold. If the ointment produced by mashing burnt filbert shells in suet is smeared on the head where hair does not grow due to normal baldness or to some disease, hair will come again.
Biofuels on the whole don’t make much sense, as they would take up far too much land to grow the necessary amount of plants (usually soybeans at this point). But as a waste product, they do make sense to some degree.
Anisogramma anomala
None of the cultivars are 100% resistant, and even then are only resistant to the single strain of EFB that’s present in the northwest. These varieties invariably fail to survive in the Eastern US, which is populated by more strains of EFB.
Meaning all plants are derived from the same genetic stock, propagated through grafted cuttings.
…a neohybrid is a cross containing more than two species, with new crosses carried out and selected for multiple generations – at least six.
For more on the subject, read Rutter’s excellent book Growing Hybrid Hazelnuts from Chelsea Green Publishing.
Which is not the case with regard to chestnuts or hickory-pecans.
The goal here is to keep EFB under control, but they may be shooting themselves in the foot long term with this practice…
Note that you have to be planting open pollinated varieties, not hybrids. This is also an oversimplification but in most cases is basically true.
Another very cool topic. I am especially excited about this one. Our seminary head-chef always featured Oregon hazelnuts on the front counter where we could pass by and glean. Never did I give such thoughtful reflection to this remarkable nut as you have here. I am also excited that you knew about Julian of Norwich’s contemplation of the hazelnut. I came across these texts recently in a seminar with a prominent scholar who, get this, was writing on Julian of Norwich and hazelnuts. He said that nobody else had written on the topic in his field. His name is David Albertson. I’ll have to find out if he published that work. Thanks for writing!