Their subtle curves glisten white against the straight, dark trunks of other trees. Like playful ballet dancers amid a battalion of straight-backed soldiers, the birches offer cheerful respite from the dark winter woods.
“Oaks for ruggedness and spruce for sober dignity,” wrote nature writer Robert Lemmon when he catalogued The Best Loved Trees of America. But the birch tribe “has little use for such sober virtues,” he asserted. “Gaiety and grace stand high among its assets.” In February, when gaiety and grace may seem in short supply, birches invite us to partake of their delights.
“People love trees you can interact with,” says botanist Ty Minton, co-chairman of the Environmental Studies Department at Antioch/New England Graduate School in Keene, New Hampshire. Birches invite interaction: their curling bark draws kids irresistibly to peel it. (Peel once, only the curling part, and you won’t hurt the tree. Nothing makes a better fire-starter.) From the leaves of the red birch you can also make a fragrant wintergreen-flavored tea, and from its fast-flowing sap, both pancake syrup and a sparkly, champagnelike beer.
At no time are these trees more balletic than after a February ice storm. Glazed in crystal, their pale, slender forms arch in the Woods “like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair/before them over their heads to dry in the sun,” as Robert Frost wrote in his poem “Birches.”
Ice storms that tear the limbs from other trees only make birches more beautiful. Swinging on birches in summertime, as Frost suggests in his poem, doesn’t permanently bow them, but ice storms may. If a storm lasts several days, the tree will never recover its original posture.
Perhaps this is why, when the American Forestry Association founded a movement to plant trees on Mother’s Day, the first tree set forth to honor mothers of the nation was a white birch—an apt symbol for the flexibility and sacrifice that motherhood demands.
And perhaps it is this combination of poignancy and gaiety that moves so many poets to celebrate the feminine charms of the birches. Samuel Coleridge called the English birch “the lady of the woods.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow begged the paper birch to give its bark; with it, he vowed to build a canoe “that shall float upon the river/like a yellow leaf in Autumn/like a yellow water lily.” James Russell Lowell considered the gray birch (probably the same species Frost swung upon) a tree of such ladylike delicacy that “thy shadow scarce seems shade.”
Yet the birches were sculpted by forces tough as granite and ruthless as hail. Birches’ flexibility, as well as their distinctive light-colored, peeling bark, are adaptations to the extremes of northern winters.
Although the river birch may be found below the Mason-Dixon line, birches evolved in the North, and as a group remain coldloving creatures. In many areas, they are the main deciduous trees in forests dominated by spruce and fir. The evergreens shed snow and ice from needlelike leaves, but most deciduous trees would be felled by the weight of the heavy snows in the mountains of the Far North. The balletic birches, with no way to shun the snow, survive by yielding to it instead. They bend rather than snap.
Birches can survive as far north as the High Arctic, where they grow only two inches tall on granite outcroppings. The real danger to trees in such frigid climes is not cold, but heat. Dark-colored bark absorbs the heat of sunny winter days; come nightfall, plummeting temperatures can contract smooth bark fast enough to crack it open. Most other trees developed vertically furrowed bark, which functions like an accordion file, to accommodate these extremes. But the smooth-barked birches adopted a different strategy: their light color reflects heat rather than absorbs it.
Maintaining this light color may be the reason birch bark perpetually peels. Antioch ecologist Tom Wessels notes that by regularly shedding their skins, birch trees may prevent the accumulation of lichens, mosses, and fungi, which would darken the bark. (The longest-lived of the tribe, the yellow birch, is also the most enthusiastic peeler: among misty, moss-hung forests, it’s the only tree that looks like it has eczema.)
Birches’ unusual bark makes it ideal for many human uses. The word “birch” derives from the Sanskrit bhurga, “a tree whose bark is used for writing upon.” The paper birch was the deciduous tree most often used in the technology of the northern Native Americans, according to horticultural research archivist Sheila Connor, of the Arnold Arboretum. Resinous and flexible, sheets of the waxy, lustrous bark were pulled each spring from the tree by applying heated water to the trunk. Bound with cedar rootlets to springy cedar or spruce frames, the seams and needle holes sealed with pitch, the bark of the paper birch provided the finest canoe covering the wilderness could offer. Native Americans made bowls and built tents from it. They rolled it into megaphones to call bull moose. They even used it to construct coffins.
And the birches’ utility runs more than skin deep. Their bite may be more fun than their bark—if you make beer from the sap of the black birch, that is. (The stuff has “the kick of a mule,” says Minton. And Wessels still has corks stuck in the sheet rock of his basement from a particularly bubbly batch that burst.) A few weeks after maple sugaring, you can reuse the same equipment to tap the swifter-flowing sap of this fragrant tree. (Euell Gibbons supplies recipes for both beer and syrup in Stalking the Wild Asparagus.)
Wintergreen-flavored tea can be made by steeping finely minced twigs in boiling water. Early settlers thought the drink cured dropsy and dissolved kidney stones. But thanks in no small part to Frost’s poem, the most celebrated use of birches remains the province of country boys and girls. The pastime also provides a great incentive for proper botanizing. A student at Vermont’s Putney School, fancying himself “a swinger of birches,” climbed up a slender trunk—which promptly snapped and crashed to the ground. A broken leg reinforced the lesson: if you’re going to swing, choose a birch, not an aspen.