Birch

We rarely think of birch as either a medicinal or a culinary plant, focusing only on its ornamental value, but native Americans used birch as well as maple as a medicine and a flavour. You have to drill a hole in a birch tree to collect sap, and if you don’t wait until the sap is flowing the surface will scar over and reduce the flow. To make a thick syrup, birch sap must be boiled down to decrease its volume – and you have to use very low heat or it scorches. Some people use birch sap to make beer, wine or soft drinks too.

Cultivation

Birch (betula) is an ornamental tree which grows in most temperate climates. The best known is the betula alba or silver birch. While it can be tall, most garden trees are either dwarfed species or pruned to keep their height down.

Parts Used

Young dried leaves for teas, and sap for cooking purposes. A dye can also be made from birch bark and was used by people up until the 1800s to dye leather

Uses

Primarily the birch leaves are used as a medicinal tea, a litre of water poured onto a handful of chopped dried leaves is excellent for people who have dropsy, gout, and rheumatism, but the thing birch is most famous for is the way it helps reduce the pain and inflammation of infections of the urinary tract. In Russia, birch sap is bottled and used as a tonic, especially in spring and it is claimed there that young birch leaves, boiled in water and allowed to cool, serve as an astringent mouthwash.

Birch photograph by Sandor from flickr under a creative commons attribution licence.