A twist in the Lamb’s Tail – Corkscrew Hazel.

Posted by

Ali Barwani

6 February 2026

On 6 February 2026

It may have been a day like this – grey above with a freezing mist draped shroud-like over the ground, when Canon Henry N. Ellacombe died following a fall on 7th February 1916. Three days later he was buried in Bitton churchyard. Included among the mourners at the funeral of this Gloucestershire vicar were the Director and Assistant Director of Kew Gardens. This honour was well deserved, as the good canon had an obsessive interest in plants and natural history. During his lifetime Canon Ellacombe was a celebrated gardener, and author of numerous articles and books on gardening. Ellacombe was also a generous gardener. According to the Bitton Parish History Group, D. C. Lathbury, the distinguished British journalist and editor, stated that ‘a true gardener is known by the pleasure he takes in giving plants to his friends; by this standard, Ellacombe was “a prince among gardeners”’.

It is one of Ellacombe’s gifts that has brought me to Myddelton House Gardens, around one hundred and fifty years after it was given. To get to the roots of the story I consulted Bryan Hewitt, gardener, writer, and historian, who worked at Myddelton House Gardens for 34 years. Bryan, author of an informative biography of Edward Augustus Bowles (1865-1954), told me, ‘Canon Ellacombe greatly encouraged the young ‘Gussie’ Bowles in developing the parkland he had inherited, by gifting a small plant of the ‘corkscrew hazel’ he, or possibly one of his gardeners, had successfully propagated from a natural ‘sport’. Ellacombe had himself been gifted his plant from its original discoverer, Lord Ducie, who found it growing in a hedge near Bristol [in around 1863]’. Bryan added that, ‘Ellacombe was a regular visitor to Bowles’s home, Myddelton House, for meetings of the New River Company, as the canon was not only a shareholder, but also a descendant of the creator of the New River, Sir Hugh Myddelton’. No wonder, that with this early encouragement, E. A. Bowles went on to become one of the greatest plantsman and garden writers of his generation.

What makes this form of hazel, Corylus avellana ‘Contorta’, so special? Well, the limbs of the corkscrew hazel are just as convoluted as the story behind it. This mutant form of the native hazel looks as if it was designed by the makers of those funfair ‘buzz wire’ games, where the challenge is to guide a hooped wand carefully along a twisted wire from one end to the other, without touching it and triggering a buzzer. Like the sinuous wire in the game, the branches of this shrub seem to have lost all sense of direction: they curl, bend, and spiral, often doubling back on themselves. This deciduous bush looks at its finest right now, bearing catkins on its twisted, leafless stems. Its sculptural quality makes it a star of the winter garden, and harvested branches are beloved by flower arrangers. The corkscrew hazel is also valuable to nature, its nuts provide winter sustenance for mammals, and it has been chosen as the RHS Wildlife Wonder plant of the month for February 2026.

If you look at the photograph you will see that the hanging male catkins are still closed, but within a couple of weeks they will burst open to resemble fluffy ‘lamb’s tails’, shedding clouds of golden pollen as they dance in the breeze. The sharp-eyed among you will also have noticed that directly above the catkin cluster on the left-hand side of my photograph there is a tiny tuft of scarlet stigmas (the receptive, sticky part of the female flower) which have opened before the catkins mature, to avoid self-pollination. Contorted hazels do not come true from seed, so the only way to propagate them is by taking cuttings. Bowles (in his book ‘My Garden In Spring, 1914) records that Ducie ‘increased it by layering, and so distributed it to a few friends’. These friends were a network of the wealthy and influential horticultural elite of the time. Nowadays, common practice is to graft contorted hazel onto an ordinary native hazel rootstock, which means you need to keep an eye out for the emergence of any straight basal growth and prune it out as soon as you spot it, before it takes over.

Like the crime writer Val McDermid recently revealed about herself, E.A. Bowles would probably be assigned a ‘sensitivity reader’ to remove any language that could cause offence from his earlier works if he were still writing nowadays. His puckish sense of humour, which I enjoy, reflects attitudes prevalent at the time. Bryan smiles wryly, telling me, ‘Gussie, had been clearing an area close to the New River and the boundary wall, with the intention of creating a bed for a collection of “demented plants”, plants that did not grow true to form. He made the hazel its first “inmate”. The “Lunatic Asylum” was born’. Over the years the eccentric collection continued to grow, adding other rarities such as a twisted hawthorn, a dwarf form of elder, and a laburnum with oak-like leaves.

The contorted hazel found wider fame thanks to Sir Harry Lauder’s (1870-1950) use of an extremely wonky walking-stick as a prop. Lauder was a Scottish music hall and vaudeville superstar, and a household name. He was the first British recording artist to sell one million records, at one time becoming the highest paid entertainer in the world! This soon earned the corkscrew hazel a new moniker, ‘Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick’. Nowadays, Sir Harry Lauder’s name recognition has significantly faded among the general public, but this nickname is still used by gardeners.

Today, you will find two contorted hazels growing in the ‘Lunatic Asylum’, and the signage says, ‘the Asylum still contains the Corkscrew Hazel which as Bowles said in 1914 “was the first crazy occupant and is perhaps the maddest of all even now”’. The smaller of the two bushes was a gift to the garden from Bryan, in the 1980s. The larger specimen certainly has age to it. Bryan, with his gardener’s eye, tells me to consider its location, growing in the shadow of an ancient yew tree and a magnificent specimen of Acer pseudoplatunus ‘brilliantissimum’, and therefore not to be surprised if it has failed to achieve its full potential.

Corkscrew hazels remain a Marmite plant – you either love it or hate it. They look their best before their leaves appear. E. A. Bowles wrote that, ‘when covered with the large crumpled leaves it has a heavy somewhat diseased look as though attacked by leaf rolling caterpillars’. Bryan is certainly a fan of this botanical curiosity, telling me he has ‘a standard of a contorted hazel clone with red foliage, ‘Corylus ‘Red Majestic’, top-worked at three feet onto a trunk of an ordinary Corylus avellana’. Pausing to think, Bryan adds, ‘I long for someone to discover a variegated ‘sport’ on the contorted hazel. I’m sure it is only a matter of time’. So, keep your eyes peeled when you are walking along country lanes or visiting open gardens. You might be the one who discovers it!