Barcelona
A named hazelnut cultivar.
The record
- Parentage
- not recorded
- Origin
- Thought to have originated in Spain; in North America from the mid-1800s
- Rights
- freely propagated — In North American commerce since the nineteenth century, long predating the US Plant Patent Act of 1930. No patent, certificate, or trademark found in the sources consulted.
- Blight
- Susceptible to eastern filbert blight
- Bearing
- Biennial, with blank nuts
- Share
- More than 60 percent of Oregon acreage in the sources consulted
Description
The benchmark, and the reason there is a breeding programme at all. ‘Barcelona’ is thought to have originated in Spain and reached North America in the nineteenth century; George Dorris planted the first commercial Oregon orchard at Springfield in 1903 with more than two hundred trees of it, and it went on to hold the majority of the state’s acreage for over a century.
It is not a good cultivar by the standards its successors are measured against. It bears biennially, it sets blanks, and it is susceptible to eastern filbert blight. It is the standard anyway, because a hundred years of infrastructure — harvest timing, handling, in-shell market expectations — was built around it.
That is the useful lesson for anyone planting a new crop. The incumbent variety is rarely the best one. It is the one everything else was built to fit.
Where to find it
No source recorded. That does not mean the cultivar is unavailable, only that this record does not yet name a nursery carrying it. Point us at one and it goes in.