Beauty and grace of resilient birch

LOOKING out of the window in the direction of the bog I can see a couple of small birch woods.

The pale trunks are shining in the wintry sunlight. I like looking at them. Birches are among my favourite trees.

They’re never very large and they’re not long lived —- birches seldom reach a hundred years unless they’re coppiced. But there is a grace and beauty about their summer and autumn foliage and the wonderful winter colour of their trunks.

I like them so much that years ago I used to go down to the bog edge and dig little saplings out of the peat and bring them back to plant on my own land. I don’t bother any more because there’s a wild birch wood to the south west of my field —- the direction of the prevailing wind.

Birches produce immense numbers of tiny seeds which are wind dispersed. I have discovered that nature does the planting for me.

There are, without doubt, two native species of birch in this country. Silver birch and downy birch each have a different chromosome count.

Another thing I used to do years ago is examine birch trees to work out which species they belonged to. The reason I gave this up is because I found plenty of typical silver birches and plenty of typical downy birches but I also found every conceivable intermediate form. I believe they hybridise very readily in this country and, as I don’t have access to the technology to count chromosomes, I’ve given up trying to tell them apart.

The downy birch type is certainly commoner in my part of the country where winters are long and cold and most birches grow on poorly drained and very acid peat soils. Downy birch is much hardier. It is one of the very few wild tree species that grows in Iceland and Greenland, where silver birch is not present.

But in the country as a whole it appears that silver birch is commoner. Coford, our forestry research body, surveyed wild birches in this country in the late 1990s, and discovered this piece of information. The survey was carried out as the first phase in a project to improve the quality of both species of Irish birch with a view to making them suitable as a forestry crop.

Foresters like trees with long, straight trunks that can easily be machined into planks or veneers for plywood. The project is on-going but they seem to have run into problems because a lot of young trees have been eaten by hares.

Birch is a very useful forestry crop and is an industry staple in countries like Poland and Finland. It’s a pioneer tree that’s colonising cutaway bogs in my part of the country. It grows rapidly and tolerates a wide range of climatic conditions and soil types. The one thing it doesn’t like is being shaded by taller trees. That’s why it’s not common in mixed woodland, except on the woodland edge.

It’s not just that birch produces excellent quality timber; practically every part of the tree has some use. The sap, fermented or unfermented, makes an excellent drink. The only commercial use it’s put to in this country is for building fences in National Hunt racing.

Finally a survival tip that you’ll almost certainly never need. Birch bark is full of oils and if you peel off tissue-thin strips they will catch light from the slightest spark, even when they’re wet.