VAL BOURNE says every garden should have at least two hazel bushes

Every garden should have at least two or three hazel bushes - Corylus avellana - tucked into a corner. You can cut the catkins in spring, to add structure to a vase of daffodils. You can create a woodland bed where the dry hazel litter collects, to give shelter for small animal and insect life, including bumble bees. The leaf litter layer will also help and encourage spring woodlanders like the erythronium White Beauty' - pictured in Looking Good.

More importantly, you can coppice the bushes for sticks during winter. For hazel sticks make the best long-lasting supports for peas and soft-stemmed perennials in need of staking. A regime of planting three together and cutting one back every third year is usually enough for smaller gardens.

There are red-leaved forms of hazel like C. avellana Purpurea' or plain-green leaved ones. Some have better crops of nuts than others. But nuts attract squirrels and they dig up the lawn when they retrieve their treasure. So I prefer decorative hazels. Now is an excellent time to plant them.

If you have got enough room add a willow and make it a decorative one like the orange-stemmed mouthful' Salix alba var. vitellina Britzensis' or the dark-stemmed Salix daphnoides. These will glow in winter sun and, if you cut the willow back every year in late spring to encourage shiny, whippy growths, you can contain it. The collected willow withies can be used for edging borders and lawns.

The trick is to cut your sticks for staking before the sap rises and the buds break. If you cut them too late, after the new buds have started into life, you will soon find yourself with rooted willow and hazel cuttings. Similarly, if you cut them too soon, when the leaf is still on the plant, the leaves will never come off and your sticks will look untidy. You can probably tell that I've done both.

Natural stakes look so much better than straight bamboo canes and they are pliable enough to bend over and make into domes or grids. The euphorbia in the picture is supported by hazel sticks woven together and this is quite easy.

Push the sticks into the ground as far as you can - usually easier after heavy rain. Bend them over and weave the twiggy parts together in an up and under' way so that they bind together. Then the plant grows through the hazel and doesn't flop. It's hard on the hands. If the hazel or willow won't bend, soak it in water by putting it into a water butt, or, dare I say, the bath. Large sticks can be woven together in the same way to support and train a vigorous rose. This picture was taken at Waterperry in late April or early May, when they do their staking. By August the staking is hidden by leafy growth. It's important to get it done before the top growth gets too tall and it's soft-stemmed plants like euphorbias that benefit most.

Later-flowering plants, like asters, monardas, echinaceas and phlox, are often stiff-stemmed enough not too need it especially if they are grown hard in airy situations with no nitrogen-rich plant food to soften them up.

Your hazel corner could be a delight in spring starting with snowdrops and oriental hellebores, followed by pulmonarias and wood anemones. Erythroniums, trilliums and dicentras will add to your flowering carpet providing colour from January until late-April.

When seeking out dicentras there are far prettier ones than the usual tall Dicentra spectabalis so often sold in garden centres. This lanky, frost-prone plant is not as pretty as the mound-forming types like Bacchanal'. But any green-leaved form will look good under a leafy canopy. I would avoid dicentras with grey-green foliage for a woodland planting.