Woodland

Silver Birch: Restoring the Post-Ice Age Landscape

Silver birches frequent our woodlands like angelic apparitions, white-gowned and dusted with the first new foliage often glimpsed in the early months of spring.

With elegantly slender and silvered barks polarised by the dark peeling of their papery layers, silver birch trees are outstandingly easy to identify.

Practically unmissable in our landscapes, piercing the haze of forest greens with snowy luminescence and inciting an ancient sense of health and cleansing to emerge within the gloom.

Native to the UK, the silver birch tree is hardly a rare find.

Its dainty, ornamental structure lends itself naturally to landscaping aesthetics both contemporary and classical. But the allure of the silver birch transcends its mere sight.

This deciduous species is entangled in its own unique mythology.

Silver Birch
Silver Birch has so many uses, even down to making canoes from the bark.

It was believed by ancient Europeans to hold a distinct range of metaphysical symbolisms occurring in absolute symmetry to the trees’ physical qualities, reverences and practical uses that are equally as resonant to us in the modern age.

Read More: The Impact of the Loss of Our Ancient Woodlands

With a sleek, ethereal image, silver birches are overwhelmingly feminine in their appearance and aura.

An instantaneous impression kindling the ancient opinion that the species was a symbol of new life, fertility and healing – all qualities which could be considered maternal or feminine.

These spiritual correspondences are again rooted much deeper than the species’ ethereal aesthetics alone.

The silver birch exhibits its individuality and religious significance in a number of ways.

One being its early showcasing of greenery during the initial weeks of spring while most other leaf-shedding trees continue their span of winter dormancy.

This first flush of green to a deciduous forest imparts the notion of healing to the carcassed, winter woods.

The fresh wave of life upon the birch trees resembling a harbinger of hope, welcoming the season of blossom, growth and light ahead.

Restoring the Post-Ice Age Landscape

Following the retreat of Ice Age glaciers, silver birches were amongst the first species to take root and lay the foundations of the British woods and green havens we know today.

Read More: A Guide to the Wildflowers of our Ancient Woodlands

The silver birch is often claimed to be a ‘pioneering’ species. The tree’s widespread dominion upon our early landscapes plant it firmly within Celtic mythology as a symbol of healing, cleansing, regeneration and hope.

Heathland
Danbury Common – Heathland For centuries Danbury Common was used for grazing cattle, goats and sheep, particularly in those areas where the ground is a poor quality gravel, ill suited to agriculture. This resulted in the generation of open heathland covered by small shrubs and heathers. Image Credit: Malcolm Reid

A pioneering species must host at least a handful of unique qualities which allow it to seed, thrive and spread where all else fails.

The silver birch prospers in a range of soils, favouring those which are acidic.

Whilst far from being the only UK tree species to do so, its self-seeding, fast-growing characteristics cemented its ability to blossom swiftly after the Ice Age across Northern Europe, conquering the blank canvas of soil exposed to sunlight for the first time in over 5000 years.

Once established in acidic soils, silver birch is known to improve the quality of the earth around it.

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Renowned for reducing acidity of wet ground, birch allows a myriad of calcicole (acid-hating) trees, wildflowers and organic life to thrive and reproduce, in soils which were once too acidic to support them.

Silver birch has been recognised for centuries, if not millennia, for its benefits of balancing the quality of the soil, organically cleansing the ground and allowing a range of wildlife to flourish within their space.

The species continues to be planted by landscapers today for this very reason.

The healing and maternal nurturing of the post-glacial soils by the silver birch, amongst others of its botanic family of birches.

Betulaceae, was doubtless realised by the ancients who wove these sentiments of purity and new beginnings into the core of the tree’s mythology and spiritual reverence.

Read More: What is Heathland?

The miraculous post-Ice Age restoration wasn’t a fluke on the birch’s part. Silver birch and its related species prove their pioneering qualities time and again.

Often being one of the first trees to repopulate a landscape gutted by forest fires or other natural disasters, offering an ever-relevant modern context to the birch tree’s ancient correspondence to healing and new life.

Cleansing the Earth and Home

In pagan practices both old and new, the birch’s spindly branches and twigs are gathered and threaded into ritualistic brooms, used to sweep and cleanse spiritual areas, homes and gardens of negative energy.

Purifying the space and driving out the torments of evil entities whilst inviting a fresh sense of balance within the vicinity.

Silver birch is a traditional choice when it comes to carving babies’ cradles.

Not only for the malleability of its wood, but for its maternal and metaphysical correspondences of healing and protection, inspired by its pioneering survival and early displays of foliage.

Ancient Methods in Modern Bushcraft

Leaves, Oils and Detoxing

Birch’s qualities of cleansing and healing aren’t contained to spiritualism and superstition.

Birch leaves are edible and full of vitamins and minerals, making a nutritious choice for ancient gatherers and modern foragers alike, though requiring an acquired taste comparable to the initial strength and bitterness of kale.

Read More: Iron Age Trackways That You Can Still Walk Today

Silver birch leaves are known to lather when scrubbed in the presence of water, forming a natural soap due to their abundance of saponins: the organic, foam-forming chemicals composing most natural, plant-based soaps.

Alongside utilising the leaves for physical cleansing, many bushcrafters and herbalists throughout history have also acknowledged the detoxifying qualities of birch leaves, when ingested or used upon the skin in the form of massage oils and face masks.

Tree Saps for Nutrition

The silver birch exhibits its nurturing, healing qualities in more ways than simple, green-leaved nutrition.

Within each silver birch’s bark flows a nutritious, seasonal resource of sap which can be ‘tapped’ and harvested by drilling a hole in the birch’s trunk and channelling its clear liquid into a suspended bucket.

Extraction of birch sap
Extraction of birch sap

When collected in early spring before the first signs of foliage, the sweet sap of the silver birch arises as a rare, fleeting delicacy of the season.

Tasting naturally fresh and partially sweetened, birch sap carries a low, but noticeable sugar content of around 1%.

Inviting it to be imbibed in both its raw form, as well as processed into preservable food products, drinks and additives.

Read More: Ancient Trackways: Walking in the Footsteps of Neolithic People

Harvested after its short prime season, birch sap loses its idyllic, satin-smooth texture and flavour to overwhelming bitterness.

And harvested in the ideal season, but left too long, the silver birch’s sweetness is also replaced with acidity, poetically similar to the Ice Age soils.

The species first spawned in, yet likewise unpleasant to the taste, spurring the sap’s age-old transposition into unspoilable, fermented products such as wine, beers, vinegars and syrups.

Similarly to its leaves, birch sap is profluent with vitamins and minerals believed to host a stunning range of advantages in both medicinal and cosmetic use.

The sap of the silver birch was continuously worked into various herbal remedies across the breadth of Europe.

Including treatments for infertility, kidney stones, baldness and scurvy, whilst finding particular use in ancient Britain in various rheumatism therapies.

Birch Pitch and Natural Glues

The creation of pitch is usually achieved using pine sap or resin, which forms an incredibly sticky, natural glue once mixed over heat with charcoal.

This substance can be utilised in a wide range of bushcrafting experiments, from waterproofing to fire-starting, alongside its more obvious effects as a plant-based super-glue, used for example in fixing flint-cut arrowheads onto spears and shafts.

silver birch
Birch bark pitch made in a single pot: The birch bark is heated under airtight conditions, the final product consists of tar and the ashes of the bark.

Containing premium amounts of resinous oils within its anatomy, the silver birch is not only fabled for its springtime sap, but also for it waxy bark which is so thickly coated that it is water-resistant.

Allowing its paper-thin layers to be peeled, written on and preserved as an ancient and durable alternative to paper.

Read More: Menhirs Date From the Neolithic, But What are They?

After collecting the oil-steeped bark of the silver birch, it can be mixed with charcoal over heat to form a viscous glue suitable for heavy-use repairs and fire-lighting, just like regular pine pitch.

Fire-Starting

A waxy, resinous tree distinctive for its sap, spindliness and paper-thin peeling of bark, it is hardly surprising that the silver birch has anchored its most prominent modern day use in the realms of fire-starting.

While its waxy finish bestows organic water-resistance to its wood, nature counters this blessing with increased volatility, birch being intrinsically flammable, even in wet conditions.

This isdue to the resins and oils saturating its composition.

 The silvery grey bark cracks and peels with age. The branches are pendulous towards their tips and the leaves are 4cms long and oval. The leaves turn a fabulous yellow in Autumn, with catkins in the Spring.However, you can’t beat that ghostly, grey bark on a cold winter’s day. Credit: Carol Walker

This gives birch a unique advantage for bushcrafters when it comes to starting fires in damp conditions, although maintaining those fires can prove to be another challenge.

The silver birch’s exfoliating bark can be peeled and gathered, its use as an antique paper-equivalent transferring neatly from writing to fire igniting, just like newspaper scraps.

Read More: The Story of our Prehistoric Woodland Clearances 

Except innately embedded with an extra splash of gasoline. Other than its resins, birch’s easy ignition is sparked by the species’ timber being lighter and less dense in composition than other hardwood trees.

Allowing it to dry quicker, burn better but also burn through its supply more quickly than other species.

For this reason, bushcrafters will often recommend using birch’s papery bark and easily-ignitable tinder as a quick and reliable way of lighting fires, before layering and topping up with longer-burning woods such as oak to ensure the fire’s longevity.

Woodworking and Crafts

Being naturally water resistant and placed on the lighter side of the hardwood spectrum makes silver birch trees outstandingly versatile and malleable in woodworking.

Both in historic and modern practice, its countless uses can be found ribboned throughout lifestyles and cultures across the globe.

silver birch bark canoe

Plywood remains one of birch’s main employments the modern age, perhaps stemming back to Native American societies.

The Native Americans fashioned canoes from its water-resistant trunks and repaired eventual cracks and splits in the timber with birch pitch, quite romantically melding the trees’ severed elements to each other again.

Silver birch’s slender, snow-white and picturesque branches were often favoured in various crafts such basket weaving and utensil carving, its timber carrying an ideal equilibrium between rigidity, flexibility and aesthetic.

Meanwhile, its inherent water-resistance and non-toxicity optimised its adaptation into bowls.

silver birch bark box

Also into plates and other common, ancient household objects, designs which have been replicated for millennia and can still be purchased today.

Silver birches confetti modern bushcrafting and ancient mythology as eminently as they scatter the landscapes around us.

Their spiritual reverence demonstrably linked to their physical impact upon society, even the species’ flammability awakens metaphysical connotations of fire-borne purification, new life and nourishing, maternal warmth.

Removing their spiritual backdrop, ancient religious symbolisms continue to emerge within each practical use of the silver birch tree, enlightening us to a long-lost way of attunement with the natural world that nurtures us.

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