You will often find hazel trees on modern truffle plantations but there is another kind of hazelnut orchard dotted around the countryside in southern Europe. These are relics from a different era, they are orchards planted almost one hundred years back in a time before mechanical harvesting.
Forty years ago, the area we live in most of the year was home to around 600 acres of hazel orchards. Now there might be ten. And as this style of orchard is no longer financially viable, these last trees standing may not be around for much longer. They are planted on uneven ground and are packed too closely together so the trees have to be harvested by hand. This is costly but besides, there are too few hands available to do the work. The younger generation move to the cities, leaving these rural villages behind with aging populations, old ways and orchards which cannot be maintained.
One such neglected grove lies a few hundred metres from our house near an area I would often take the dogs for a run. January many years ago, one of our truffle dogs Jane slammed on her brakes mid-sprint and did a swift U turn. She had caught a scent on the air and was now chasing the source among the overgrown hazel trees. As I ran behind her, I saw that she was digging and shouted at her to stop. She lifted up her paw to show me the top of a smallish black truffle emerging from the earth. I scraped at the soil with my fingernails, extracted it and cleaned it up enough to identify that it was a tuber brumale. My first thought was that this would be a one-off discovery, but following Jane on a more thorough exploration of the interior, proved me wrong. This species of truffle was growing throughout the entire orchard and I left there some hours later with very dirty, broken fingernails.
This was a great piece if luck – a handy, profitable discovery right on our doorstep. For several years between the months of January and March, the dogs and I would walk this abandoned grove sniffing out that morning’s mature specimens. Every Friday we would drive to the city and sell the brumale to restaurants to be served up to the weekend crowds. Most chefs were hesitant at first, this is not a well-known truffle, but by the second year we couldn’t keep up with demand. Prior to this chance find, I had not been at all familiar with the species myself, so I began reading up on hazel trees and tuber brumale. In my research, I came across an 2008 study by truffle expert Marcos Morcillo who had inoculated old Spanish hazel groves with truffle spores in an attempt to kickstart truffle growth.
The concept was fascinating and there had been some success. However before we could think about replicating the research, there were a couple of matters to sort out. For a start, this was not our land to meddle with. Another problem was that unmaintained hazel trees quickly get out of hand and this was increasingly the case which was impacting truffle production. The usual course with unmanaged, unruly old groves is for the owners to hand over the land to wheat growers who bulldoze the trees and convert the area into industrial farmland. However these elderly ladies who owned this land had no interest in selling. There is very little market value while the sentiment attached to the place was immeasurable. As young sisters they had played among the trees during harvest time and these were trees which their grandparents had planted in the 1920s. Razing the place to the ground would be a loss not only to their family legacy, but on a much wider scale. Turning it over to wheat would mean ripping apart an entire ecosystem- the orchids, lizards, butterflies, dormice and woodpeckers and the countless other species co-habiting with the hazels and the truffles.
I went by the owners’ house and over coffee and sweets, asked if they would allow my family to manage the land. My proposal to clear the orchard and maintain it, in return for half of the hazelnuts and whatever the land produces -went down well. The owners get to have the odd nostalgic picnic on their old stomping ground. We can look after the truffles properly and as a bonus get a few sacks of nuts each August. Meanwhile, the hero of the story, one of the last few surviving old ecosystems, gets to see another day.
We got to work immediately on clearing the forest which is a huge task after over a decade of neglect. These old varieties of hazel tree are spread out and require more pruning than the compact modern varieties. As well as working with the trees, we have been adding spores to the soil in areas where truffles are still growing and spots where they used to grow. This spore mixture is a simple concoction of dried truffle scraps blended with fructose, spring water and vermiculite. It is fed to the trees while we tend to the task of creating the right kinds of growing conditions for healthy truffle production. This might involve tweaking the shape of the tree and the amount of light that can get through the canopy. We know that some ground covering is favourable, possibly helping to regulate temperature but we don’t want too many weeds underfoot.
I would love to be able to report that all this pruning and clearing lead to marked increase in truffle yield. Sadly not, severe pruning of the host trees means that there will likely be few truffles for the coming seasons. Projects like these take time and a great deal of patience and even then, I don’t expect this project to a financial success. Fortunately success can take various forms, many of which are a little trickier to quantify than numbers in a bank account. As we experiment and observe and eat hazelnuts, there is an occasional feeling of what these more intangible successes might look like. Perhaps it is the excitement of growing in our understanding of the natural world and our connection to it. Or maybe we are finding joy in tidying. I am not sure but I feel something grounding and deeply satisfying to moving forward and allowing the past to co-exist, building on the fruits of past labours rather than tearing them down.
Marcos and others like him, Paul Thomas in the UK, Charles Lefevre in the US, Alessandra Zambonelli in Italy are pushing the boundaries of truffle research right now. With many more mycologists at work around the world, a large portion of these studies are geared towards informing commercial truffle tree plantations. What though if those of us who work in the forest can take knowledge from the science and apply it to wild growing areas? Are there low impact ways to grow truffles without the need for all the resources used to start a cultivation from scratch? Could a project like this give value to remaining old style hazel orchards throughout Europe and ensure their survival? And what about struggling natural truffle ecosystems, will new information from the labs impact their future?
In time, there may be clearer answers to these questions, the beginnings to solutions to our current challenges. For now though, I am very excited to be caught up in this challenge of growing hybrid truffles, half-wild, half-cultivated. By a stroke of luck, I have a unique chance to study truffles up close, to better understand these fungi which have become so entwined with my family’s life. Like many hunters, we have spent years blinkered by the monetary or culinary value of truffles, forgetting that their principal worth is ecological, tied to their role in promoting forest health. Hunters tend to be constantly looking down in the dirt, but when you remember to look up, you are reminded of the work these amazing fungi do. The trees themselves are signalling to us to look beneath them. The truffle trees beckon us, standing out as they do, as the healthiest, most well-nourished, vibrant specimens in the forest.
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