Paper Birch

"The birch path is one of the prettiest places in the world," observed Lucy Maud Montgomery in her classic Anne of Green Gables. Artists Tom Thomson and Lawren Harris both painted birch growing in natural settings. Certainly, whether in a garden setting or wild in the woods, there is something about birch that appeals to the Canadian psychic. These, of course, are the classic Paper Birch, Betula papyrifera, also known as the Canoe Birch.

Designated a 'pioneer species,' it is one of first to colonize areas following wildfires. The most widespread of all the North American birches, ranging from Labrador to the Yukon and Northwest Territories and Alaska, south into Nebraska and Ohio. Preferred sites are those situated on forest edges and, classically, the shorelines of lakes and rivers--anywhere to avoid excessive summer heat. As such it has been designated the provincial tree of Saskatchewan and the state tree of New Hampshire. Despite being shallow-rooted and short-lived it is frequently installed by newly transplanted suburbanites as a landscape specimen for their front lawns. Under such challenging conditions the favoured multi-trunk choice is unlikely to survive more than 30 to 40 years. And much to newbies concern, young trunks and branches are dark, reddish brown to black only turning white as they age. Another concern is the larvae of a moth that mines through the leaves, leaving unsightly tunnels. Under stress, this may weaken the birch and invite additional attack by the even more aggressive bronze birch borer. Neither are easily--or safely--controlled. Long before the now-ubiquitous subdivision or even modern cities had spread to the lands of the Paper Birch, peoples of the First Nations had found multiple uses for the bark of this 15 to 30-metre tree. As babies, they might be carried in a birch bark cradle and when dead be buried in a birch bark coffin. Between times bark-covered wigwams provided shelter while within might be found bags, boxes, bowls, baskets, paper, maps, torches, fans, musical instruments, even clothing all supplied by this wonderous bark. But the ultimate ingenuity of the people created that Canadian icon, the birch bark canoe. Sheets of bark obtained in spring or fall were fastened together with root fibres of white fir or larch roots and these joints smeared with the sticky resin from balsam fir. Such transportation might last a decade--better than, as Rebeca Rump has remarked, Detroit's best efforts. This classic transportation was eagerly adopted by the French-Canadian voyageurs in their travels from sea to sea to sea. Some have claimed that the white outside of the bark faced the inside--strange considering its natural curvature. However, Tom Thompson and other observant Canadian artists both before and after him depict canoes with the white bark to the outside.

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Latter day voyageurs and backpackers have rediscovered that even in the dampest conditions, that dried birch bark from fallen and rotted trees makes outstanding tinder, an excellent fire starter. Elsewhere the wood itself has been put to such mundane uses as spools, clothes pins, dowels, popsicle sticks, tongue depressors, and toothpicks. A novelty--and an expensive one--is birch syrup, obtained in much the same manner as that of the classic maple product. The savoury flavour lends its as an accompaniment to pork or salmon or to flavour ice cream, beer or, being North America, a soft drink said to resemble root beer. However, it is Betula pendula, the Silver, White or Common Birch of Europe, North Asia, and North. Africa that provides birch brooms, the 'besom' used by Scottish curlers and fastidious gardeners to brush leaves off their lawns--and witches on Halloween. These are invariably depicted the wrong way around (if it was a male witch, a warlock astride one would be a flying sorcerer). There have been more unpleasant uses. Old fashioned birching was once favoured for chastising recalcitrant schoolboys. In more recent reformed times it has re-emerged in somewhat different venues. "I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults," Gore Vidal informed David Frost on the latter's show in 1966.