Family Betulaceæ
The birches are a family of exceedingly graceful and attractive trees, and charm us quite as much in winter by the color of their stems and the delicacy of their twigs, as they do in summer by the fresh green of their foliage. Like other trees, birches vary in appearance according to the place where they grow. If they are shaded by other trees in the woods their trunks are tapering and tall and free from branches, but when they grow in open fields and the lateral branches develop, their general outline is bushy and far less attractive; unlike other trees, birches are improved by not having full development.
The birch has been known from the earliest ages, and it is found in Europe, Asia, and North America.
There are distinguishing characteristics in the details of buds and stems, but the color and texture of the bark on the trunk and branches of the different species are the most obvious and certain means of identification in winter.
There are in all six native species in New England, and one from Europe which is planted in our parks and gardens.
Canoe, Paper or White Birch Betula papyrifera
A large, graceful tree, 60 to 75 feet high, with wonderfully white bark splitting into thin, tough layers. Branches thicker, buds larger, catkins larger than those of other birches, and the upper part of the twigs is hairy. The buds are sticky and greener inside than those of other birches,—less silvery and soft. The leaf-scars are alternate.
GRAY BIRCHES
Betula populifolia
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In winter, as at every other season of the year, few trees surpass the canoe birch for beauty and delicacy. No other tree has a bark so shiningly white, and even the snow is unable to dim its purity. We usually think of this tree as being fragile and delicate, especially when we recall it as it grows along the edge of woodlands where the shade of other trees has forced it to grow slender and tall in reaching for the light. The canoe birch is really a large tree, however, and often grows to an enormous size among the northern hills where it seems to thrive best. The feminine characteristics associated with this tree in our minds—“Most beautiful of forest trees, the Lady of the Woods,” etc.—receive a curious shock when we come suddenly upon a huge old birch growing in a clearing in the woods, for all the world like a middle aged and corpulent matron among the younger trees.
The wood of the canoe birch is light, but it is hard and strong. It is used for making shoe lasts and shoe pegs, spools, wood pulp, and for fuel. The Indians use it for making sledges, paddles, the frames of snowshoes, and the handles of hatchets. They also use the bark for making canoes, wigwams, and baskets, and they make a drink from the sap of the tree.
The generic name, Betula, probably comes from the Celtic name for the birch, betu, or it may possibly have come from the Latin batuere, in reference to the birch rods with which the Roman lictors drove back the crowds of people. The specific name, papyrifera, refers to the paper-like bark which peels off in thin lateral strips.
This birch is found in the mountains of New England and generally throughout the Northern and Northwestern States.
American Gray or White Birch Betula populifolia
A small, slender tree, 15 to 30 feet high, with an erect trunk, It grows in poor soil and is found growing commonly along sandy roadsides. Several shoots spring from the trunk near the ground. Bark close fitting, with a chalky white surface. Black triangular spaces below each branch. The ends of the twigs are very rough to the touch. Alternate leaf-scars.
This little birch is perhaps the least interesting member of a most attractive family. It is found commonly growing along the sandy banks of country roads and in waste, barren places where pitch pines and blueberry bushes and scrub oaks are found. It is invariably associated with sterility in our minds, and seems to demand nothing of the soil on which it grows, adapting itself immediately to its surroundings, and thriving where other trees would die.
BLACK BIRCH
Betula lenta
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Although the bark is white and might be confounded with that of the canoe birch at first sight, the trees can easily be told apart. The gray birch has a close-fitting bark which is dirty white in color, with triangular black blotches under the branches, it is exceedingly chalky to the touch and never peels off as it grows old, while the bark of the canoe birch peels off in thin lateral strips, is clear white in color, and seldom shows any dark blotches on the trunk, The bark of the recent shoots of the gray birch is rough to the touch, and that of the canoe birch is smooth and sticky where the buds join the stem.
Its wood is soft, light, and neither strong nor durable. It is used for wood pulp, shoe pegs, spools, barrels, and for fuel.
The specific name, populifolia (poplar-leaved), refers to the leaves which quiver in the wind and show light under surfaces like the aspens. The gray birch is found throughout the Northeastern States.
Black or Sweet Birch Betula lenta
A tall, round-headed tree. The branches twist in different directions, but are pendulous and graceful. The young shoots are brown, dotted with white, and smooth. The bark is smooth, dark brown, and resembles that of the garden cherry. The buds are conical and pointed. The twigs have an aromatic taste. Alternate leaf-scars.
Few trees deserve greater appreciation than the black birch and few receive as little from people in general. It is always beautiful, but in winter when the smooth golden brown stems are bare and the sun strikes it squarely, it glows to the tip of the smallest branch with a wealth of radiant, living color.
The black birch is easily distinguished by the dark color of its bark, which is smooth on young trees and cracks into rough square plates on old trees, but which never peels off in strips. Its gray stems have a sweet, spicy taste, which is also a means of identifying the tree.
The wood is heavy, strong, and hard, and its surface after being polished is like satin. It is much sought after for furniture and is excellent for fuel. An oil made from the wood is used medicinally and as a flavoring extract, and a sweet beer is made by fermenting the sugary sap.
The specific name, lenta (pliant), refers to the flexible stems and branches of this tree. The black birch is found in rich woods throughout the Northeastern States.
Yellow Birch Betula lutea
A beautiful straight tree, 50 to 90 feet high. Distinguished from the black birch by its yellowish or silver-gray bark, which, unlike the brown bark of the black birch rolls back and peels off in thin, filmy strips from the trunk. The bud scales overlap each other. Alternate leaf-scars. Delicate twigs with an aromatic taste, not as sweet as the black birch. The catkins are larger round than those of the black birch.
YELLOW BIRCH
Betula lutea
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This is in every way a worthy sister tree of the black birch, and the rich yellow of the trunk, but partially revealed through the gray, shaggy, outer layers of the bark, is quite as beautiful as the rich red-browns of the black birch bark. Thoreau felt the charm of yellow birches. In his journal, Jan. 4, 1853, he says: “To what I will call Yellow Birch Swamp, E. Hubbard’s in the north part of the town, ... west of the Hunts’ pasture. There are more of these trees in it than anywhere else in the town that I know. How pleasing to stand near a new or rare tree; and few are so handsome as this: singularly allied to the black birch in its sweet checkerberry scent and its form, and to the canoe birch in its peeling or fringed and tasselled bark. The top is brush-like, as in the black birch. The bark an exquisite ... delicate gold color, curled off partly from the trunk with vertical clear or smooth spaces, as if a plane had been passed up the tree. The sight of these trees affects me more than California gold. I measured one five and two-twelfths feet in circumference at six feet from the ground. We have the silver and the golden birch. This is like a fair flaxen-haired sister of the dark complexioned black birch, with golden ringlets. How lustily it takes hold of the swampy soil and braces itself. In the twilight I went through the swamps, and the yellow birches sent forth a yellow gleam which each time made my heart beat faster. Sometimes I was in doubt about a birch whose vest was buttoned, smooth and dark, till I came nearer and saw the yellow gleaming through, or where a button was off.”
The yellow birch is one of the most valuable timber trees of the North. The wood is heavy, hard, and strong, and is used for making furniture, the hubs of wheels, and boxes. Few hard woods of a light color make as attractive flooring as polished yellow birch.
The specific name, lutea (yellow), refers to the color of the wood and bark of the trunk. The yellow birch is found throughout the Northeastern States.
Red or River Birch Betula nigra
A medium-sized tree found on the edges of streams. Long, graceful, sweeping upper limbs, with small, pendulous lower branches. The bark is reddish, very shaggy and loose, flaking off and rolling back in thin strips. Alternate leaf-scars. Twigs reddish brown and pliant.
RED BIRCH
Betula nigra
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The red birch is easily distinguished from all the other birches by its reddish, loosely peeling bark, which gives the trunk an unkempt, shaggy, and torn appearance. The outer bark separates into flakes which are loose at one end and adhere to the trunk at the other, and these projecting strips look like a fringe. The lower branches often bend down towards the ground in a straggling, irregular fashion, while the upper branches are free and sweeping. It should not be inferred from this description that the red birch is lacking in beauty, for it is a most attractive tree. Its general outline is picturesque, and the soft red color of the peeling epidermis of the bark in the upper branches has a very pleasing effect. The red birch is the only semi-aquatic species among the birches, and its drooping branches hanging over the water add much to the beauty of our streams and rivers.
Its wood is light but strong, and is used for furniture, wooden ware, and yokes.
The specific name, nigra (black), was given it by Linnæus, the celebrated Swedish botanist,—it seems to have no particular significance.
The red birch is found growing on the banks of the Nashua and Merrimac Rivers and beside smaller streams in Massachusetts, but it grows more frequently along river banks in the South than in the North.
A small shrub (Betula pumila), the dwarf birch, found in rocky pastures in Western Massachusetts, Connecticut, and in the South and West, completes the list of our six native birches.
European White Birch Betula alba
A tree from Europe, extensively cultivated in this country. White, chalky bark. Long, slender, down-sweeping branches. Small buds. Alternate leaf-scars.
The slender, drooping branches of the European white birch are so long and pliant that the slightest breeze sets them swaying in one direction from the trunk, like a shower of rain driven by the wind. The birch does not lose its pendulous grace in mere limp dejection, like most of the weeping varieties of trees that gardeners love to propagate, but it holds its head high and the slender branches droop down,—a striking contrast to the weeping willow and other lachrymose specimens of horticultural art.
There have been constant allusions to this tree in English literature. Perhaps the most descriptive is one of Sir Walter Scott’s which refers to the slender, pendulous boughs,—
EUROPEAN WHITE BIRCH
Betula alba
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“Where weeps the birch with silver bark
And long dishevelled hair.”
From an artistic point of view much has been said about these trees. In the “Sylvan Year,” Philip Gilbert Hamerton calls the stem of the birch “one of the masterpieces of Nature.” “Everything,” he says, “has been done to heighten its unrivalled brilliance. The horizontal peeling of the bark, making dark rings at irregular distances, the brown spots, the dark color of the small twigs, the rough texture near the ground, and the exquisite silky smoothness of the tight white bands above, offer exactly that variety of contrast which makes us feel a rare quality like that smooth whiteness as strongly as we are capable of feeling it. And amongst the common effects to be seen in all northern countries, one of the most brilliant is the opposition of birch trunks in sunshine against the deep blue or purple of a mountain distance in shadow.”
Miss Jekyll, in “Wood and Garden,” says that the tints of the stem give a precious lesson in color. “The white of the bark,” she says, “is here silvery white and there milk white, and sometimes shows the faintest tinge of rosy flush. Where the bark has not yet peeled off, the stem is clouded and banded with delicate gray and with the silver-green of lichen. For about two feet upward from the ground, in the case of young trees of about seven to nine inches in diameter, the bark is dark in color, and lies in thick and extremely rugged and upright ridges, contrasting strongly with the smooth white skin above. Where the two join, the smooth bark is parted in upright slashes, through which the dark rough bark seems to swell up, reminding one forcibly of some of the old fifteenth-century German costumes, where a dark velvet is arranged to rise in crumpled folds through slashings in white satin.”
The wood is used in Europe for fuel and for making furniture. It is rather curious to find that the birch has been celebrated as an instrument of chastisement since early Roman times. Gerard says that in his time “schoolmasters and parents do terrify their children with rods made of birch;” and Shenstone, in the “Schoolmistress,” has a pathetic little account of the fears of small boys as they watched the wind waving the branches of a birch tree growing by the schoolhouse,—
“For not a wind might curl the leaves that blew,
But their limbs shuddered, and their pulse beat low;
And, as they looked, they found their terror grew,
And shaped it into rods and tingled at the view.”
HOP HORNBEAM
Ostrya virginiana
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The European birch is found throughout the North of Europe, and grows in every kind of soil, both wet and dry,—the Earl of Haddington called it, with quaint humor, “an amphibious plant,” and after two hundred years this is still descriptive of its habits.
It is perhaps unnecessary to say that the specific name, alba, alludes to the color of the bark.
Hop Hornbeam; Ironwood Ostrya virginiana
A small, slender tree, 30 to 50 feet high. The bark is light, and scales off in thin flakes, and is seldom more than a quarter of an inch thick. Small, acute buds; alternate leaf-scars; delicate twigs. Small catkins, usually three together, pointing upwards. Hop-like fruit, often remaining on the tree through the winter.
There is but one native hop hornbeam in New England, and it is an extremely interesting little tree. It grows under other trees in the forest, and is easily overlooked, usually being mistaken for a young elm. Of all trees the hop hornbeam is the most retiring in its habits, and takes much the same place among trees that the hare does among animals, or the violet among flowers, living a secluded life in wild places, where the woods partially conceal its identity.
Its outline against the sky in winter is most delicate and pretty, the twigs are very slender, and are tipped with the three little pointing fingers of the catkins, and the whole tree produces a most pleasing effect. Although the hop hornbeam frequents the woods, it never makes even a small area its own. It is always found mixed with other trees, and I have never seen even a little grove of hop hornbeam trees growing alone.
The wood is very strong, hard, heavy, tough, and durable, and is used for fence posts, the handles of tools, and small articles.
The generic name, Ostrya, comes from the Greek ostryos (a scale), in reference to the scaly catkins of the fruit. Virginiana is the specific name for the North American hop hornbeam as distinguished from the European species, which it closely resembles.
The hop hornbeam is found in rich woods from Nova Scotia to Northern Florida, and westward to Eastern Kansas.
Hornbeam; Blue Beech Carpinus caroliniana
A tree or tall shrub 10 to 25 feet high. Bark smooth and dark gray, tough like a horn, and close-fitting. The buds are oval. Delicate twigs, in flat, spreading layers. Alternate leaf-scars. Fruit in clusters,—leaf-like bracts, holding little nuts.
HORNBEAMS
Carpinus caroliniana
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The hornbeam, like the hop hornbeam, is a small tree and is found growing under larger trees in the woods. It is readily distinguished from the hop hornbeam by its smooth, dark bark, the hornlike appearance of which instantly suggests its name. There is but one native species in New England, and it is much smaller than its sister tree from Europe of the same name. The European hornbeam has long been used for making hedges, and in Germany the hornbeams are planted in such a manner that every two plants intersect each other in the form of a St. Andrew’s cross. At the point where the two plants cross each other the bark is scraped off and the hornbeams are bound together closely with straw. The two plants grow together in a knot and send out horizontal shoots in a few years, making an impenetrable hedge. The hornbeam was much used in formal gardens for labyrinths, arcades, and groves, and as hedges for geometric designs known as “the star” and “the goose-foot.”
The wood, like that of the hop hornbeam, is hard, heavy, strong, and close-grained. It is used for small articles, like the handles of tools.
The generic name, Carpinus, comes from the Celtic car (wood), pinda (head), meaning that the wood was used for making the yokes of cattle. The specific name, caroliniana, was used to distinguish the American from the European species.
The hornbeam is found growing on the banks of streams and in moist woods throughout New England, and in the South and West.
Chapter VII
THE BEECH, CHESTNUT, AND OAKS
The Chestnut and the Beech.