Hazel appears in at least one of the Unicorn Tapestries with clear botanical specificity: in “The Unicorn is Killed and Brought Back to the Castle,” a Hazel tree is shown in both fruit and flower in the lower left corner. This detail is confirmed in art‑historical commentary and visual analysis of the tapestries’ millefleurs backgrounds, which include more than eighty identifiable plants.

The tapestries are famous for their botanical precision. Over a hundred plants appear across the series, woven with enough accuracy that botanists have identified most of them. Hazel’s inclusion is deliberate, not decorative. It is one of the few trees shown in a state of simultaneous blossom and nut, a symbolic impossibility that medieval artists used to signal timelessness, fertility, and magical potency.

In the same corner, a red squirrel perches on a Hazel branch, clutching a nut. The tapestries are filled with animals chosen for symbolic meaning: pheasants, goldfinches, rabbits, lions, and the squirrel is no exception. While the sources do not explicitly state a Norse/Germanic myth connection, the tapestry tradition does place symbolic weight on each creature. The squirrel’s presence beside Hazel reinforces the tree’s role as a threshold species: a creature of the canopy, the margins and the in‑between spaces.

The tapestries’ designers were known for embedding layered symbolism, secular, courtly, and Christian, into every plant and animal. Hazel’s appearance in fruit and flower aligns with the tapestries’ themes of fertility, renewal, and resurrection, which are woven throughout the series. The unicorn itself is a symbol of both Christ and the lover‑bridegroom, and the plants around him echo these dual meanings.

Hazel’s presence in this visual grammar places it among the trees of meaning, not merely the trees of landscape. It stands in the same symbolic register as the pomegranate tree in “The Unicorn in Captivity,” which represents fertility and marriage. Hazel’s dual state, blossom and nut, mirrors the unicorn’s dual nature: wild and tame, mortal and immortal, earthly and divine.