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The Silver Birch

Quick Notes about the Silver Birch Take me here now

The Facts

Tree Type: This is a medium-sized deciduous tree with a very distinctive white bark which can be peeled off in strips. It grows quite straight and slender, and is popular with landscape gardeners for its colour and shape.

Location: These trees are found right across the central band of Europe and Asia, from Ireland to Japan, and has started to colonise areas of north America where it has been introduced.

Ecology: The seeds of the silver birch are light and easily carried by the wind. This makes it a ‘pioneer’ species, which means that it spreads rapidly whenever it encounters open space. It is often one of the first new growths seen in areas that have been cleared by forest fires.

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The Legends

Some birch trees have what look like untidy birds nests of small twigs, called ‘witch brooms’. In fact they are caused by a fungus which stimulates twig production on a patch of branch and then feeds on the green shoots.

The waxy, waterproof nature of birch bark made it useful for writing on when paper was not available. Ancient birch bark manuscripts are still being found in Afghanistan and Russia.

In Poland many people believe that hugging a birch tree improves physical and mental health. The sap of the birch can also be tapped like a maple and turned into a syrup or a drink.

Make sure your volume is on: "A perfect tree that provides its own kindling"

Show transcript

We have a silver birch, another native to the UK. Beautiful tree, very distinctive from its white bark, very white papery bark. Little slightly heart-shaped leaves with a serrated edge. Maybe not heart-shaped, maybe more oval, tear-drop shaped, with a serrated edge.

The bark is like I said very papery but it’s oily as well. The native Indians used to use it to line the bottom of their canoes, so it has waterproof properties. It’s got oil within it which also makes great tinder to start a fire. You can burn birch green so it means it doesn’t need to be dried, and you can use its bark to get the fire going, so in my eyes it’s one of the perfect trees! [And the bark burns even when it is wet as well] Indeed. It is the oil within the sap within the bark that just goes up.

[I think you can tap it like a maple tree as well]. You can, it makes extremely good syrup, very nice. My wife made some. It tastes like … birch!

A very good tree. You get forests of it up in Scandinavia. It is grown for timber, used in kitchens, furniture. It’s very white wood so once it is cut down and dried it is very white, so it is prized for furniture and cabinet making. A beautiful tree.

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