Birch

Kynes puts a few bits of the bark into a sachet to carry as a love charm. The papery outer bark is up to a fifth betulin and lights easily even when damp; slabs of it have roofed houses, strips have been woven into shoes and small boxes, and it was long used in tanning. Distilled, it yields the birch tar oil that gave Russia leather its smell.

The leaves smell pleasantly aromatic and taste bitter. Grieve records them taken as an infusion, birch tea, for gout, rheumatism and dropsy, and trusted to dissolve kidney stones; Culpeper prescribes the juice of the young leaves, or a water distilled from them, for stones of the kidney and bladder and as a wash for a sore mouth.

In spring a strong flow of sap rises in the trunk and can be tapped. At about one per cent sugar it is drunk fresh, boiled down like maple syrup or fermented. Grieve gives a birch wine of March sap with honey, cloves and lemon peel, and Culpeper the distilled water drawn from a trunk bored with an auger.

Cunningham records that birch twigs were used to strike the possessed and drive their spirits out, that the witches' broom was bound from them, and that cradles were once made of birch wood to protect the babies in them. Birch brushwood still makes besoms and racecourse jumps, and the pale timber goes into furniture, plywood, skis and kitchen utensils.