Great things, nuts. Think of the wintry smell of roasting chestnuts, the fresh taste of a new crop of hazels, salty fried almonds with a glass of fizz, or pickled walnuts – black, sinister, delicious – with a good goat’s cheese. All can be grown at home, given the right conditions.

If you are considering planting a nut tree, using a bare-root or rootballed specimen – which will give you the greatest choice – do so as soon as possible, before their leaves break. You can plant container-grown trees at any time, though if you do so in high summer, you’ll have to water them regularly to get them established.

Hazels and their relatives cobs (which are smaller than the common hazel) and filberts (more elongated in shape) are the easiest to grow. They are happy in soils that are neither bog nor desert and enjoy shade. Unpruned, most will reach the size of a small tree and will even fruit if treated as a generously scaled and informal hedge. They also look lovely when coppiced – that is, cut down to the ground every few years so they produce a number of stems from the base. These can be cut to make straight, strong staves, to use as garden supports for annual climbers.

The tiny, madder-red female flowers (technically called “styles”) that produce the nuts usually appear at the tips of the previous season’s growth, so overclipping will vastly reduce your crop. The grey-yellow male catkins, which hang from lateral buds, make a much bigger show and are several inches long. They release a smoky cloud of pollen if you tap them, and are a lovely sight in spring.

I’ve planted hazels and filberts beside walks, planning an eventual overarching, with the bulb Scilla mischtschenkoana ‘Tubergeniana’ beneath, giving drifts of washy blue flowers just as the catkins open. In smaller spaces, try groups of four, using different varieties. That makes cross-pollination easy and will vastly enhance your crop. If you buy hazels cheaply as hedging, make sure the plants are seedlings, rather than divisions of one specimen, otherwise crops will be light.

Hazelnuts and cobs are both varieties of Corylus avellana; among those easily found are ‘Nottingham’ and ‘Webb’s Prize Cob’. Filberts, C maxima, have a frilly green outer husk that entirely covers the ripening nut. Again, there are some lovely varieties – try ‘Lambert’s Filbert’ and ‘White Filbert’. Those with coloured leaves, such as ‘Purpurea’, are commonly grafted, so assiduously remove any suckers from the rootstock, otherwise the grafted plant will soon be overwhelmed. There are also several “contorted” forms, in which the branches twist and turn in an agonised way, which makes them popular with flower arrangers. These will also fruit.

If you’re keen on dinner-table visuals, plant mostly filberts. A broad rustic dish piled high with nuts, their silky gloss just visible in elegant brown wrapping, will delight the eye as well as the taste buds. Some people claim they can taste a difference between varieties of hazels and filberts. Others are too busy cracking the next nut to care.

Be aware, though, that the flavour will change during storage. It is crisp, light and “greenish” just after the October harvest; by Christmas, the full “nuttiness” has developed.

Almonds will crop in warm southern gardens and can look magnificent when they flower in early spring – if they escape a late frost. They produce drifts of pink, sometimes white blossom and a perfume just acrid enough to keep its allure. After a good summer and a long, slow autumn, they will give you plenty to crack open at Christmas.

Traditional varieties often flower so early that there are no bees about, which makes hand-pollination necessary. This is easily done with a cheap watercolour brush, though it can be a fag. Fortunately, later-flowering varieties that are self-fertile and much more resistant to the scourge of peach leaf curl disease, are now appearing. Buy them as bushes, train them in a rough fan shape against a south- or west-facing wall, spray if necessary – and protect, if you can, from squirrels.

One example is Prunus dulcis ‘Robijn’, which has pale pink flowers in mid- to late spring. Another is ‘Mandaline’. All will be grafted on peach seedlings, so make sure the rootstock doesn’t sprout and flower – peach pollen on almond flowers yields bitter nuts.

Some gardeners worry when the velvety green “fruit” begins to split in July and August. This is natural and lets the seed inside dry in time for harvest.

If you have plenty of room, then chestnuts and walnuts are for you. Both make handsome trees that grow happily in much of the country, although the best nut crops come from warm gardens in good summers.

Chestnuts (Castanea sativa) have gorgeous foliage that goes buttery yellow in autumn. They grow fast, taking about 10 years to reach 25ft, and can give picturesque trees up to 50ft high – perfect if you are planning an avenue. Flowering, on elegant green catkins, is early, but new growth is easily killed by late frost.

Wild trees have several nuts in each spiny case, which is fine for wildlife, but not much use for roasting, as they are so small. Named varieties usually produce single nuts: good old ones are ‘Paragon’ and ‘Marron de Lyon’. These can crop in five years from planting, so if you have space, try an elegant gamble on global warming. Old sorts of chestnut coppice well and make good staves. Modern breeding is creating varieties that are better suited to smaller areas. ‘Maraval’ is a French one that can crop in two seasons or so, and will even survive in containers.

There are various scares about an American blight affecting the European species of chestnuts. It will indeed infect them, but it turns out that, in this country, the blight fungus itself gets infected with a virus that pretty much stops it from killing the trees.

Slightly less handsome, but easier to manage, walnuts (Juglans regia) make fine specimen trees and, if your garden is mild or there’s a brilliant summer, give good crops of nuts. Grown from seed, they can take decades to flower. They are also self-sterile, so need other seed-grown walnuts nearby to produce fruit. If you want a faster crop, plant a grafted variety, which should produce nuts after about four years.

If you have space for big trees, look for names such as ‘Franquette’ and ‘Ronde de Montignac’. As with the other nut trees, modern varieties are coming onto the market that make walnuts a potential crop even in a small garden.

Old or wild varieties all fruit at the tips of last season’s growth. New ones fruit on lateral buds and can therefore be grown as productive hedges, about 6ft-10ft high, and pruned on each side in alternate years. ‘Fernor’ and ‘Lara’ can be treated thus, are becoming easy to find and crop prodigiously.

As with the other nut trees, squirrels are a nuisance and can strip your whole crop. Rather than trying to compete with them, you can harvest the walnuts when they are green (soft enough for a needle to go through them – usually in June) and pickle them in either vinegar or port.

Shelling out? Here’s where to buy

Scotts; 01460 72306, scottsnurseries.co.uk. Keepers; 01622 726465, www.keepers-nursery.co.uk. Buckingham Nurseries; 01280 822133, hedging.co.uk. Blackmoor; 01420 477978, blackmoor.co.uk. Agroforestry Research Trust; 01803 840776, www.agroforestry.co.uk. Ken Muir; 01255 830181, www.kenmuir.co.uk. Walnut Tree Company; walnuttrees.co.uk.

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