The Grand Sablon is better known for its antiques market and its chocolate shops than for a tree, which is exactly why the Turkish hazel standing in it is easy to walk past.
Turkish Hazel
Corylus colurna
A hazel is supposed to be a shrub you can see over. We map 9 of them, in 7 cities.
The Turkish hazel puts up a single straight trunk instead and keeps going: the one in the Square du Temple in Paris stands sixteen metres tall with a trunk 235 centimetres around. The Amsterdam tree, planted in the Hortus in 1795, is called the oldest and thickest of its kind in the Netherlands by the Dutch tree foundation. Romania has only two officially protected specimens of Corylus colurna and one of them grows in Cismigiu in Bucharest. Vienna protected a pair in the Resselpark in 1972 for the way they match, though they went in seventeen years apart, in 1900 and 1917. The best line about any of them belongs to French regional television, which ran a news piece written in the voice of the hazel in Square Maurice-Gardette: I am 145, stop cracking my hazelnuts.
Brussels
Paris
Most people picture a hazel as a shrub they can see over.
In fruit
French regional television once ran a news piece written in this tree's own voice, headlined "I am 145, stop cracking my hazelnuts and let me age in peace".
Amsterdam
Bomenstichting, the Dutch tree foundation, calls this the oldest and thickest Turkish hazel in the Netherlands: planted in 1795, and three metres around today.
Toronto
George Hebden Corsan was an internationally known swimmer and a health food evangelist, and he spent forty years proving that nut trees would grow in Ontario.
Krakow
Turkish hazel is not the shrub its name suggests.
Vienna
Vienna protected these two trees for looking alike.
A Turkish hazel with a crown 25 metres wide is a surprise, because this is a species usually met as a neat, narrow street tree.
Bucharest
In fruit
Romania has only two officially protected specimens of Corylus colurna, the Turkish hazel, and one of them grows inside Cișmigiu, Bucharest's oldest and most visited public park.
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