Birch Bark

There’s no denying that despite being very popular trees, birches can be hard to live with. They’re ground-robbing, they shed leaves and seeds in profuse quantities, and aphids that drip honeydew on anything beneath the host trees often attack them. Yet for all that, birches have an enduring appeal that is due in no small measure to their magnificent bark.Granted, they also offer a graceful growth habit, extreme hardiness, vigour and reliably brilliant autumn colour, but it’s the bark that is their instantly recognisable feature. Yet that very fact often tends to lead to all birches being lumped together, because while even the uninitiated can recognise the white-barked birches, they tend to label them all as ‘silver birch.’ There’s more to birch bark than that.Undoubtedly the best of the white-barked birches is Jacquemont’s Himalayan Birch (Betula utilis var. jacquemontii [syn B. jacquemontii]), particularly the cultivar ‘Silver Shadow’. It and other chalky white forms, such as ‘Grayswood Ghost’ and ‘Jermyns’, are usually grafted onto Betula utilis rootstocks, which makes them hard to come by and expensive. However, the basic B. u. var. jacquemontii is still a beautiful tree and well worth growing if you can’t find or afford one of the fancier cultivars. Betula utilis itself, has orange-pink bark with a pronounced white bloom, as does the Chinese Red Birch (B. albosinensis).The Japanese White Birch (B. platyphylla var. japonica) also has pure white bark and is much the same size (around 20 m tall) as B. utilis, but has the advantage of being far hardier. While seedlings show variations in bark colour, cultivars are reasonably consistent.The Paper Birch (Betula papyrifera) is the tree most often mistaken for the Silver Birch (B. pendula). The two trees are very similar. Paper Birch, which occurs from Greenland to Canada, is slightly taller than the Eurasian Silver Birch, and its bark peels in sheets rather than strips. Otherwise there’s little to choose between them, save for the Silver Birch’s somewhat more weeping growth habit. Both are capable of reaching 30 m tall and are among the worlds most frost hardy trees. Downy birch (B. pubescens) is another very similar tree.Both Paper Birch and Silver Birch occur in a range of varieties and cultivars. However, the Silver Birch offers a wider range of forms, including the strongly weeping B. p. ‘Youngii’, the cut-leaved B. p. ‘Dalecarlica’ and purple-leaved forms that often also have purple young twigs.Many of the cheaper purple-leaved birches are seedlings and their foliage colour is very variable; often very dark green, not purple at all. For the best colour look for named cultivars, such as ‘Dark Prince’, ‘Purple Rain’ or ‘Crimson Frost’. They have leaves that really stand out against their white bark.Other birches have bark in different colours. That of the River Birch (B. nigra) is cream to a warm cinnamon shade that is rather reminiscent of Paperbark Maple (Acer griseum). Yellow Birch (B. alleghaniensis) has cream to bronze bark that yields an aromatic oil, while Black Birch (B. lenta) has reddish-brown to black bark that falls off in scaly plates instead of peeling in strips. Monarch Birch (Betula maximowicziana) is a 30 m tall, open-crowned deciduous tree native to Japan. Its peeling bark is often a warm orange-brown tone when young and can be lustrous. Betula 'Fetisowii', a Central Asian hybrid birch of unknown parentage is notable for it white bark, which peels away in large strips to reveal a warm pinkish-brown layer beneath.If you can see past the suburban cliché of three silver birches, the genus Betula has plenty to offer at any time of year.

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