Christmas Day 2023: Day One of 12 Days Wild, the Wildlife Trusts winter challenge to do something wild each day. I started by sitting in the garden in the dark at 7 am with a hot chocolate, taking advantage of the quiet to listen to the birds waking up. On a normal Monday there would be much more traffic noise – and for that matter, on a normal Monday, I wouldn’t be drinking hot chocolate at that time! As I listened, I looked at our silver birch, thinking about how significant it is to me. The tree has many stories to tell and in this post, I’ll share some of them.
(And if you wonder about that mysterious light shining through the sunflower seed feeder – that’s the streetlight in the alley beyond the fence!)
The tree is a place of shelter for some, like this very young blackbird one spring. It seemed to me that it had not long fledged, probably from the nest in the ivy on my neighbour’s shed roof. Most years, we get a young bird or two coming into the garden, and they don’t always make it straight to the safety of the tree. I remember the year we found one perched on the kitchen window sill – we stayed in the house so as not to scare it, holding our breath until one of its parents spotted it and called it to safety. Another time, I opened the garden room door one morning to discover a bird inside. He or she had got shut in accidentally, and spent the night there. Poor thing! Nestled among the leaves of the silver birch seems a better place to be.
As well as blackbirds, the tree – or rather the sunflower seeds I put out in the feeder! – attracts blue tits and goldfinches, and, less often, great tits and greenfinches. I’ve learned over the years to recognise the different species from their calls, as I don’t often see them clearly, especially when the tree is in full leaf. Sometimes I identify them by their habits – the blue tits take one seed and go to a branch to eat it, while the goldfinches eat at the feeder. Both of them ‘peel’ the seeds, even though I’m providing them with sunflower hearts, which have no shells!
The birch attracts other, smaller, wildlife too, like the bug and spider above. The first year I lived here, there was a host of sawfly caterpillars that were eating their way through the leaves. They stripped quite a few branches. But since I started attracting birds to the garden, I don’t see many at all, and the tree keeps her leaves. I assume the blue tits pick off the caterpillars before they do too much damage.
Other, unseen creatures make the tree their home too, leaving beautiful patterns in the algae on the bark. Slugs or snails perhaps, eating their way up and down in the dead of night.
The bark is papery, naturally peeling away, so sometimes I’ve collected it for lighting fires at forest school. Birch wood seasons quickly and burns well, so when we prune the tree each winter, I save twigs to use as kindling the following year.
There are many ways to give the birch twigs a second life, so much better than just putting them in the garden waste. I pile them up under shrubs to make habitat for insects, which in turn gives birds and hedgehogs a source of food. Then there are crafts: the sticks make wands, the cross on which to wrap a Godseye, flower stalks, and rungs of ladders for forest folk. They can also be turned into tiny broomsticks, reflecting a traditional use for birch.
Our garden is a real sun trap, so in high summer the shade provided by the tree is very welcome. She also gives us one anchor point for our “shade sheet”, which helps reduce the amount of watering needed for our plants. And for us, the strong trunk holds one end of our hammock 😆
As I write this, we’ve recently finished the annual prune, and it’s been quite drastic this year. It had to be, because our garden is small, and the tree is getting big! She’s about 12 years old now. We’re confident she’ll look gorgeously leafy in spring, and can’t wait for those leaves to appear. My book of tree wisdom tells me that silver birch is “womanly, constant and friendly, a tree of enchantment”, and I’d say our birch is all of those. My home office overlooks the garden, so I often find my eyes and ears drawn to the tree. Long may she be a part of my life.
Dandelion Nature 