British Plants and Flowers – Silver Birch

Name – Betula is the name of the entire genus of the birches from the Gaulish betu = bitumen, and if you think that sounds unlikely, think again. According to Pliny, the ancient Gauls extracted tar from birch trees and in fact, birch tar is still sold as a herbal painkiller and stimulant and made into birch beer in Pennsylvania. Alba means white.

Description – The silver birch, betula alba, is smallish fast-growing and short-lived tree. It requires light and is often planted as a ‘pioneer’ tree, which means the first crop on ground cleared for forestry – this is because it has highly rapid growth in its first two decades and is fully mature by forty years of age. The tree has white, often flaking bark and small green leaves, rarely moves from its slender shape and always looks young even when senescent.

Origin - This tree tolerates a wide range of habitats and the upland or mountain birch woods are an important ecosystem in Scotland and Scandinavia. The wood is white to pale fawn in colour and easily worked – it is flexible but not very strong. In addition, the silver birch in Britain commonly rots at the centre, both reducing usefulness and making it a dangerous tree to sit under when it is old, as it often falls apart without warning . Despite this, it’s a popular small garden tree, possibly because it grows so fast and possibly because of the unusual silvery-white trunk. It’s normally grown from seed, which are brown flakes with yellow seed embedded in them. They are wind dispersed and germinate the following spring – lay captured seed on a pot of sandy loam and cover with a sheet of glass. A wine fermented from the sap was credited with medicinal properties and the wood and bark can both be distilled to produce the tar which was used to make leather waterproof.

British plant silver birch photograph by ThunderChild5, used under a creative commons attribution licence

 

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