Western or California Hazelnut or Hazel        KO-ril-us kor-NU-ta cal-i-FOR-ni-ca

• Deciduous shrub, open, spreading, multistemmed, 5-12 ft (1.5-4 m) high.  Twigs brown, slender, zigzag; trunk bark gray and smooth.  Leaves alternate, simple, 4-10 cm long, ovate to obovate, base cordate, coarsely toothed margin, pubescent below.  Male flowers in pendent catkins, grouped on the ends of the previous season's twigs, they are 2.4-5 cm long.   The female flowers are small, appear as rounded buds with bright red stigmas.  Fruit (nut) covered with a involucre (husk), much longer (beak) than the nut it encloses.
• Sun to part shade.  
• Hardy to USDA Zone 5      Native range from British Columbia, south along the Coast Range and Cascades and finally further south into the Sierra Nevada of California.  In Oregon's Willamette Valley there are some 30,000 acres of commercially grown European Hazelnut or Filbert (C. avellana) and the nuts are often distributed by birds to natural area.  The resulting shrubs are sometimes confused with the native C. cornuta var. californica.
• cornuta: horned;   californica, of California.