Witch hazel bewitches by blooming in late fall
I wasn’t outside as much as I would have liked this past week so I asked a friend who works outside for some news about what has been happening in the woods. It didn’t take him long to come up with the perfect nature news - witch hazel is blooming! He was doing some trail work at the Great Works Regional Land Trust’s Kenyon Hill Preserve in South Berwick and found witch hazel blooming all along one of the trails. What a great suggestion, witches and Halloween go so well together, and witch hazel is a wonderful native shrub that everyone should be acquainted with.
This seems late for flowers, but this is all part of witch hazel's reproductive strategy: Bloom late to avoid competition with other earlier-blooming shrubs and you’ll have all of those late season pollinating insects to yourself. On warm days like we had this weekend, this works perfectly. Flies and a couple tiny wasps were visiting the tiny, scraggly yellow blooms, extracting nectar and witch hazel’s excessively sticky pollen.
That’s just the start of witch hazel’s long road to reproductive adulthood. Once pollinated, the witch hazel waits until the warm days of spring to fertilize its eggs. The fruit develops over the summer and matures in the fall at the same time the next year's flowers are opening up, making witch hazel unusual in that it has flowers, fruits, and next year’s buds all at the same time.
The fruit dries into hard capsules. As the capsule dries, it exerts pressure on the bottom of the seeds, shooting them out of the capsule with such force that they can travel over 30 feet away from the mother shrub. I plan to spend time lurking around this witch hazel patch because I have read that this explosive ejection of the seeds is accompanied by a distinct snapping sound which gives the witch-hazel the common name “snapping hazelnut.” I would really like to hear that sometime.
These seeds then take two more years to germinate, according to the USDA Forest Service Bulletin. Despite these seemingly horrible reproductive odds, witch-hazel shrubs are abundant and can dominate the forest understory.
What makes this week the perfect time for witch hazel to bloom is, of course, because it is Halloween. Why are they named after witches? According to the U.S. Forest Service, “Early European settlers observed Native Americans using American witch hazel to find underground sources of water. This activity is probably where the common name witch hazel came from. 'Wicke' is the Middle English for 'lively’ and 'wych' is from the Anglo-Saxon word for 'bend.' American witch hazel was probably called a Wicke Hazel by early white settlers because the dowsing end of the forked branch would bend when underground water was detected by the dowser.”
You can burn off some of that Halloween candy by wandering the woods looking for some blooming witch hazel. It is an attractive, often multi-stemmed shrub that usually grows to around 12 to 15 feet, but can reach up to 35 feet in height with a somewhat erratic branching pattern forming an irregular, open crown. The leaves (which are gone now) have distinctive wavy edges and turn a brilliant yellow in the fall. You have to look hard to find the flowers. Even though I knew they were there, I walked right by quite a few blooms before I remembered to look up. Once found, they are such a rich reward both for the fragrant, bright yellow flowers with strap-shaped petals and as the lone flowers in the woods of late autumn.
Susan Pike, a researcher and an environmental sciences and biology teacher at Dover High School, welcomes your ideas for future column topics. Send your photos and observations to spike3116@gmail.com. Read more of her Nature News columns online at Seacoastonline.com and pikes-hikes.com, and follow her on Instagram @pikeshikes.
This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Nature News: Witch hazel bewitches by blooming right around Halloween
