Birch wood

“ In dealing with a birch wood for this purpose, the crop may be considered recurrent at short rotation; for numerous suckers arise from the roots after the tree is felled and grow very rapidly. It is to be [87] noted with satisfaction that the well-nigh omnivorous rabbit cannot digest the young growths of birch; at least, it does not devour them wholesale.
The birch is very impatient of the shade of other trees. In its turn, although its delicate foliage might not be supposed to stop much light, its shade is very injurious to all other deciduous trees except the beech ”

“ The wood is hard, heavy, strong, fine-grained, and beautiful. It shrinks in seasoning, works easily, stands well when not exposed. It is used for spools, woodenware, and other small articles, as well as for interior finish and cabinet work. Figured birch is one of the most beautiful of American cabinet woods. [44] Birch is often stained so as to imitate cherry and mahogany; the best imitations of the latter wood are of birch. Birch is commercially divided, according to the quantity of heartwood present, into white birch and red birch. ”

“ To look at this tree is like looking at a picture or reading a poem: one feels somehow refreshed. Nor is the black birch without charm; its bark has a dusky beauty, and again shows fine wood colors and metallic tints similar to the black cherry. This fine luster the birch has in an eminent degree while most trees show it only on their small branches, if at all.
Club-mosses appear to be a lesser growth of pines, a pygmy folk dwelling at the feet of the elder race. Here are miniature trunks and branches bearing miniature cones, perfect little conifers no higher than a chickadee. ”

“ The wood is "white" when the amount is small, and as heartwood increases with age the same tree might at one time afford white and at another red wood.
Birch trees may be known by their more or less laminated bark with its peculiar long horizontal lenticles or dashes. The [p069] leaves of the several birches differ but little, but the decided colors exhibited by their barks give names and serve to distinguish the species. Nine of the twenty-four known species of birch occur in North America; six are trees and the others low shrubs. Betula is said to be derived from bitumen. ”

“ Birch-wood makes good fuel. It is also used by cabinet-makers. Its uses in "little woods" are many. The charcoal is good for gunpowder, and it is that of which crayons are made. Birch-coppices are cut for brooms, hoops, &c., at five to six years old, and at ten to twelve for faggot-wood, poles, fencing, and bark for the tanners. ”

“ All birches are subject to quick decay, if conditions are right to produce it. Yellow birch in the woods sometimes dies standing, and when that happens, the wood falls to pieces so quickly that the bark may remain standing with very little inside of it except powder of decayed wood. This tree is seldom mentioned in early accounts of lumber operations, and practically never with a good word. Operators generally left it standing when they cut the timber which grew with it. ”

“ We like the smell of this aromatic forest timber, and its clear flame. The birch is also a sweet wood for the hearth, with a sort of spiritual flame and an even temper,—no snappishness. Some prefer the elm, which holds fire so well; and I have a neighbor who uses nothing but apple-tree wood,—a solid, family sort of wood, fragrant also, and full of delightful suggestions. But few people can afford to burn up their fruit trees. ”

“ The wood shrinks considerably in drying, works well and stands well, but is not durable in contact with the soil. The medullary rays in birch are very fine and close and not easily seen. The sweet birch is very handsome, with satiny luster, equalling cherry, and is too costly a wood to be profitably used for ordinary purposes, but there are both high and low grades of birch, the latter consisting chiefly of sapwood and pieces too knotty for first class commodities. This cheap material swells the supply of box lumber, and a little of it is found wherever birch passes through sawmills. ”

“ But Scandinavian farmers sheath their wooden houses with birch bark, which makes a durable, waterproof covering, with a beautiful silvery appearance very gratifying to eyes offended by the evil aspect of corrugated iron. In Russia, also, a fragrant oil is distilled from birch-wood, whence Russia leather derives its peculiar odour. Careful housewives should note that there is no kindling equal to birch bark, which blazes up almost as fiercely as celluloid. ”

“ The small White Birch is never assembled in large forest groups. Like the Alder, it seems to be employed by Nature for the shading of her living pictures, and for producing those gradations which are the charm of spontaneous wood-scenery. In this part of the continent, a Pitch-Pine wood is commonly fringed with White Birches, and outside of these with a lower growth of Hazels, Cornels, and Vacciniums, uniting them imperceptibly with the herbage of the plain. ”

“ The day was glorious, and we had driven through lanes perfumed by the fresh green birch, with its bark silvery and many-tinted, and over commons where the very air was loaded with the heavy fragrance of the furze, an odour resembling in richness its golden blossoms, just as the scent of the birch is cool, refreshing, and penetrating, like the exquisite colour of its young leaves, until we reached the top of the hill, where, on one side, the enclosed wood, where the lilies grow, sank gradually, in an amphitheatre of natural terraces, to a piece of water at the bottom ”

“ The heartwood is dark or red, and is made into brush backs and parquet flooring, but the hearts are small, and no large quantity of that wood is used. The largest use of paper birch is for spools, the common kind for thread. Some of larger size are made for use in mills. The sapwood only is accepted by makers of spools. The heart is cut out, and most of it is thrown away or burned under the boilers. The qualities of paper birch which appeal to spool makers are, white color, small liability to warp, and the ease with which it may be cut without dulling the tools. ”

“ I was the only one that knew what sort of a tree it was, and that is all I can tell," admitted Zan reluctantly.
"The Latin for birch is "betula." Its flowers grow in catkins and bud in early spring. The tree is often as high as seventy feet. The wood is highly prized by cabinet makers. The bark is so durable that it has been found intact after the tree has decayed. Often a woodsman will come across a birch that seems to be newly fallen. He will strike in with his axe to ascertain the value of the timber and the bark will split showing a hollow inside, or at least a mass of decayed wood. ”

“ The bark has a reddish tinge, and it is so loose and ragged-looking that it has been said to roll up its bark in coarse ringlets, which are whitish with a stain of crimson. The red birch, which is more rare than any of the other kinds, is a much larger tree than the white birch, but, like all its relations, it is very graceful. The wood is white and hard and makes very good fuel, while the twigs are made into brooms for sweeping streets and courtyards. ”

“ You spoke in your last chronicle of the screen of white birches through which you saw the sun rise over the meadows of Opal Farm. This birch springs up in waste lands almost everywhere. We have it in abundance in the wood lot on the side of our hill, and it is scattered through the wet woods below our wild walk, showing that all it needs is a foothold. ”

“ What a delightful jaunt is it to move, for some miles together, through a wood of the fragrant birch, bending down its leaves to regale the nose of the traveller. The beauties of a country-seat, wood and water, are here in the greatest abundance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ My buds in spring exhale a delicious fragrance after showers, and the bark, when burnt, seems to purify the air in confined dwellings.'
"In Lapland the twigs of the birch, covered with reindeer-skins, are used for beds, but they cannot be so comfortable, I should think, as the leaves. The fragrant wood of the tree makes the fires which have to be kept up inside the huts even in summer to drive away the mosquitoes, and the people of those Northern regions would find it hard to get along without the useful birch." ”

“ It was a wood of beeches and limes, with here and there a light, silver- stemmed birch—just the sort of wood most haunted by the nymphs; you see their white sunlit limbs gleaming athwart the boughs, or peeping from behind the smooth-sweeping outline of a tall lime; you hear their soft liquid laughter—but if you look with a too curious sacrilegious eye, they vanish behind the silvery beeches, they make you believe that their voice was only a running brooklet, perhaps they metamorphose themselves into a tawny squirrel that scampers away and mocks you from the topmost bough. ”

“ This attitude of the yellow birch tree is very common in damp woods. Occasionally the seed finds lodgment in the moss on top of a large rock. The roots descend the sides until they reach the ground, and as the rock does not decay, the tree grows to maturity on the rock. The most favorable seed bed for this species is a mass of rotten wood where a log has decayed and fallen to pieces. Frequently such a plot is covered with yellow birch seedlings. They have the space all to themselves, because the seeds of few trees or plants will grow in rotten wood, unmixed with mineral soil. ”

“ The wood makes excellent fuel, and is much used for that purpose in some of the large cities of America. The bark, too, is excellent for tanning—almost equal to that of the oak.
The “red birch” is still another species, which takes its name from the reddish hue of its bark. This is equal in size to the canoe-birch, often growing seventy feet high, with a trunk of nearly three feet diameter. Its branches are long, slender, and pendulous; and it is from the twigs of this species that most of the “birch-brooms” used in America are made. ”

“ The “canoe-birch” is not the only species of these trees found in North America. The genus Betula (so called from the Celtic word batu, which means birch) has at least half-a-dozen other known representatives in these parts. There is the “white birch,” a worthless tree of some twenty feet in height, and less than six inches diameter. The bark of this species is useless, and its wood, which is soft and white, is unfit even for fuel. It grows, however, in the poorest soil. Next there is a species called the “cherry-birch,” so named from the resemblance of its bark to the common cherry-tree. ”

“ The beautiful dog-wood's sweeping sprays and broad leaves, the maiden-hairs glossy wreathes and pearly buds, and the soft emerald moss, clothing the old fallen trees with its velvet tapestry, and hiding their decay with its cool rich beauty, while the sun light falls in golden tracery down the birch trees silver trunk, and the sparkling water flashes in the rays, or sings on its sweet melody unseen amid the luxuriant vegetation that conceals it. ”

“ It has many local names for a tree so small as to be almost a shrub throughout most of its range: Black birch, sweet birch, cherry birch, water birch, and canyon birch. Its bark is of the color of old copper; wood is light yellowish-brown, with thick white sapwood; trunks seldom exceed ten inches in diameter and thirty feet high; range extends from northern British Columbia to California, and along the Rocky Mountains to Colorado and possibly further south. The uses of the wood are few. ”

“ The birch is thus remarkable, perhaps, from the feathery form of the tree, whose numerous small branches sustain so great weight, bending it to the ground; and, moreover, because, from the color of the bark, the core is less observable. The oaks not only are less pliant in the trunk, but have fewer and stiff er twigs and branches. The birches droop over in all directions, like ostrich feathers. Most wood paths are impassable now to a carriage, almost to a foot traveler, from the number of saplings and boughs bent over even to the ground in them. ”

“ It will grow where it is subjected to great heat, as well as where it must endure extreme cold, with its slender roots exploring the beds of peat, the rich humus of the old wood, or the raw soil of the mountain-side, where it has to cling to rocks and a few mosses. Given plenty of light, and it seems to care for little else. Though a mere shrub in the far north, with us the Birch has a trunk sometimes as tall as eighty, but more frequently fifty feet, and a girth of from two to three feet. In its first decade it increases in height at the rate of a foot and a half or two feet in a year ”

“ As we advanced downwards we encountered layer upon layer of the trunks of trees with the branches closely chopped off, and so soft that the spade easily cut through them. Birch was the prevailing kind of wood, but occasionally beams of oak were found, with holes at their extremities, through which pins of oak penetrated into other holes in the logs beneath. One such pin, some 3 or 4 inches in diameter, was found to pass through no less than four beams in successive layers, and to terminate ultimately in a round trunk over 13 inches in diameter. ”