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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