Birch

The birch, Betula, is a slender tree of white or silvery peeling bark, one of the first to colonise bare and burnt ground and among the hardiest of northern trees, reaching to the edge of the Arctic. Its pale grace earned it the name the lady of the woods, and its qualities of pioneering new growth and shining bark made it, across northern Europe, a tree of beginnings, purification and renewal. It is the first letter, Beith, of the ogham, the early Irish tree-alphabet, standing at the head of the sequence as the birch stands first on the cleared ground.

Birch bark's thin, waterproof, easily separated layers made it one of the most versatile writing and building materials of the pre-industrial world in several unrelated traditions at once: Sanskrit and other Indian manuscripts were for centuries written on prepared birch bark, bhurja patra, and in medieval Russia many hundreds of everyday birch bark letters, preserved in the wet clay of Novgorod and excavated from the 1950s onward, have given historians an unmatched record of ordinary literacy stretching back to the eleventh century, quite apart from the tree's use by North American peoples to build the light, flexible birch bark canoe.

The birch was above all a tree of purification and driving-out: its twigs made the besom or broom that swept a house and, in the birch-rod, beat out evil or wrongdoing; maypoles and Maytime greenery were cut from it to bring in the vigour of spring. In the shamanic traditions of Siberia and Central Asia the birch is the cosmic tree and the ladder of ascent, its trunk notched with steps up which the shaman climbs to the upper world in trance, and it stands at the centre of the tent as the axis of the worlds. Pioneering, cleansing, protective and world-uniting, the birch carries a consistent northern symbolism of new life and the sweeping-away of the old.

Across Russia, Ukraine, Scandinavia and the Baltic states, birch sap is still tapped each spring in a living seasonal tradition, drunk fresh, fermented into a mildly alcoholic wine or reduced into syrup, a genuine agricultural practice that continues today rather than a historical curiosity, timed to the same early-year surge of growth that gave the birch its old symbolism of beginnings and renewal. In Finland and the Baltic sauna tradition, bundles of birch twigs and leaves, called vihta or venik, are still used to gently beat the skin for circulation and scent during a sauna, a further living practice tying the tree to bodily cleansing rather than only to spiritual purification.