For the posters who say they see rows of bumps, that is likely the blight mentioned by anitamo and ken. The symptoms are the double rows of bumps and a loss of leaves. If you go out in early spring (early March here in PA), you will see small pink nodes on the branches. This is the ripe fungus. If you cut the branch, you will notice the brown from the dead wood starts on one side and eventually girdles the branch. The side it starts on is usually a flat spot on the otherwise rounded branch. I've had 2 of these nice trees. One I grew from seed I got after taking some catkins from another HLWS tree and pollinated mine. Since these bloom well after the normal Corylus avellana, you can't pollinate them with those. Anyway, I got small plants not grafted. They grew slowly for about 5 years old and then started dying. By this time the parent plant was also taken by the blight. I no longer have any, but lust after the nice ones I see sometimes.

Saschja, I just now saw this comment from you in July......never got a notice in e-mail. So sorry to have not responded. You can e-mail me directly at free2bebrian and the @ and then gmail.com. My name is Jan. We still have walking sticks, but have managed to keep them limited. Takes a lot of plucking. The best remedy I found is watering the plants and watching for them moving out of the wet zone. They don't like water. Then I grab them and either kill them, which I hate doing, or put them in the yard waste bin. The problem with not killing them is the risk that they just get put somewhere else via the yard waste recycling. Mostly I suck up my buddhist impulses and kill them. But its hard. Write to me and we can talk directly. The brown and green are the same, just adjusted to the different color plant part they are on usually. So sorry you have a major infestation. Not a good sign for PG. Jan

Judy, it's Devil's Walking Stick (I presume the aralia) and has little spines which stuck me when I dug it yesterday. I'll leave it here as no-one asked for it. Andi, I'll dig another Fatsia for you; they make nice house plants until they outgrow their space and then need a partly shaded area to grow to their full potential (mine is 15' tall and perhaps 20' wide...) Christine

this is a very interesting thread. i am in NH and i guess i always assumed i had aralia spinosa. after reading all of the above information about elata, i compared my shrub to the information from Janet above. guess what? i DO have aralia spinosa! no doubt about it. everything above matches. A. spinosa has an "inflorescence with a distinct central axis," that is, one main stalk to the flower cluster (YES). With elata, "central axis of the inflorescence very short or lacking" and the inflorescence has 3-8 spreading secondary branches (NO). On spinosa leaves, the veins of the leaflets do not run to the teeth(YES); on elata, they do (NO). Spinosa leaflets have a definite petiole (YES, about 4" on mine), elata leaflets are sessile or nearly so (NO). thank you so much for posting this information so that i could confirm that it is the native variety. gerryld, if i recall, the branches do seem to all fall off over the winter. i never noticed the shrub until last year when it flowered and had outstanding berries. the birds went crazy. mine is also not really not suckering too much.