Among the hazelnut trees

A story of hatred for squirrels

We bought our two little hazelnut trees several years ago, early in the planning of this garden. Their placement hasn’t always been ideal; they interrupt the ends of two vegetable beds. But as they’ve grown and spread, long branches intertwining like dancers reaching for one another, I’ve come to appreciate their willingness to build a boundary I didn’t know I needed.

And their shade. Oh! Such lovely shade in the heat of August.

It was year two when the kids discovered the miniature ecosystem of ladybug eggs hatching – juvenile ladybug larvae spreading – mature elytra red and spotting elegantly as they age – all of them hungrily feeding on the aphids – the aphids lovingly shepherded by the ants for their sugary dew. The children panicked that the aphids would harm the trees, but I asked them to be patient, to observe how this tiny community was actually thriving in harmony, the tree their resilient host.

We plucked eight small nuts that year and reveled in their perfection. It took us three fingers smashed by a hammer to discover that pliers are a better method for cracking the shells. Oops.

The following summer brought a new excitement. We all eagerly turned over the ribbed leaves to search for tiny orange ladybug eggs. We found them, and we returned day by day to watch them hatch and grow and spread as they had before. We knew now that the trees could sustain so much more than their own lives.

And on those hot mid-summer days, in the earliest moments of spring, in the fading light of autumn, I sat beneath those trees and leaned by palm against their rough bark, learning their feel, learning how they were becoming a part of this new home.

Thin and strong sprouts shoot up each year, their attempt to fill in all that delicious space with more little filbert trees. I prune them away, but I wonder now how many of them I could tease out and plant elsewhere. Would we become a grove of hazelnuts? Would we lose ourselves to the soft rustle of those leaves in the rough breeze of October each year?

But lo, an enemy approached on the horizon, and there we sat, blissfully unaware. After all, the nuts this year were full and bright, a luminous green bract cupping around each, ruffled edges and clusters tucked firmly along so many branches we could not count them. We tried anyway. We were not alone.

By the end of that week there was so much damage below each tree, so many torn leaves, broken branches, detritus of nut shells and husks, that we all feared the harvest for this year would be lost.

And so, on the spur of the moment, we carried out bags and a ladder and lost ourselves in the limbs and branches as we plucked handfuls of filberts from each tree. Because I’ll be damned if those furry little assholes are getting all my beautiful, ripe hazelnuts when I’ve been lovingly tending to these trees for so long, especially knowing that the neighbor is already feeding them peanuts that they bury and hide all over my garden and lawn. Do squirrels even have tastebuds? Or is it their desire to wreck things that drives them into my garden to dig little holes and trash my plants?

Many steps aloft, head and arms and chest lost in the branches of our Sacajawea tree, I felt blindly from leaf cluster to bract, over the remnants of dried catkins, through filmy spiderwebs, dropping great armloads into the waiting bags the children held below me. We were lost, the three of us, in an unexpected tree adventure for over an hour, those prized bags loaded with our bounty upon the return trip inside.

“Take that,” I mumbled toward the squirrels as we departed.

“We missed a few at the top of the tree,” Pumpkin mentioned.

“Yeah, well,” I shrugged, “I guess we can let the fuzzy jerks have something.”

Your trans friend (and hazelnut hoarder),

Robin