Ozark Witch Hazel
Step outside and reminders of winter are with us. A recent snowstorm paints the landscape with contrast. Rock outcrops warmed by the sun reveal the contours of the land, and evergreen pines stand distinct next to the stark branched silhouettes of oaks and hickories.
It’s a great time of year for a hike – little concern for ticks, chiggers and copperheads, and usually comparatively dry walking along a creek bed as January is (supposed to be) our driest month. It is along gravel bars of creeks and dry washes where we keep a sharp eye out for a shrub that evolved in the Ozarks, grows nowhere else, and was not actually known to science until 1908. It’s called Ozark witch hazel, vernal witch hazel or as botanists prefer, Hamamelis vernalis.
Let’s time travel back to the Eocene Epoch to around the year 51 million B.C., give or take a few million years, when the modern ancestor of Ozark Witch Hazel, the single Chinese species of witch hazel (Hamamelis mollis) lives. Fossil records and DNA evidence show that this Chinese ancestor is the most ancient of the modern genus of witch hazels (Hamamelis) which includes four North American species: common eastern witch hazel (H. virginiana), and its cousin discovered in southeast Mississippi in 2005, Leonard’s witch hazel (H. ovalis), and a geographical outlier discovered in 1935, Mexican witch hazel (H. mexicana).
There is one other Asian species, Japanese witch hazel (H. japonica), which turns out to be the progenitor of all our North American witch hazels, which diverged to North America maybe about five million years ago. DNA tell us the closest sister kin to our Ozark witch hazel is the Mexican witch hazel.
Through a series of slow motion cataclysmic events – continents colliding and drifting, mountains emerging where there were none, volcanoes and ice ages – these six fall-to-spring flowering shrubs have evolved to become refugees where we find them today, relics of a flora that existed long before Homo sapiens walked along an Ozark creek bed.
Our Ozark witch hazel starts blooming at the end of December, continuing into early spring. It has marvelously vanilla clove-scented flowers. The flowers are smaller than those of common witch hazel, and are usually orange-to-reddish smack dab in the middle, though color varies considerably from shrub to shrub. Sometimes the flowers are completely red. It’s a fabulous native woody plant. Why do we not plant this in our yards?