Secrets of the Birch Tree

Folklore of the Birch Tree

Bruce Clifton

Few trees have gathered folklore around themselves quite as naturally as the Birch. Its brilliant white bark, ability to colonise cleared ground and appearance among the first trees of the recovering woodland have made it a tree of beginnings, cleansing and renewal. These qualities occur repeatedly in the customs surrounding Birch, from the Celtic lands and Britain to Scandinavia, Finland and Russia.

One of the oldest stories surrounding Birch is that it can sweep away what belongs to the past. Bundles of birch twigs were traditionally associated with cleansing at Samhain and the casting out of the old year. The practical birch besom therefore acquired another identity: the broom could cleanse not only the floor and hearth but the spiritual environment surrounding them.

From here Birch enters the folklore of the witch’s broom. Traditional besoms were commonly made from bundles of birch twigs, and the broom eventually became inseparable from the image of the travelling witch. Yet Birch produces another wonderfully strange connection. The tree is particularly susceptible to the tangled masses of twigs known as witches’ brooms, caused principally on birch by Taphrina fungi. High in a winter birch these dark nests of twisted growth can look uncannily like brooms caught among its otherwise bare branches. The natural tree and the supernatural story appear almost to imitate one another.

Birch also belongs to the folklore surrounding birth and childhood. Birch cradles were said to protect newborn children, while dried birch leaves were placed around a baby’s cot in the belief that they would impart strength and help the child cast off weakness. Here the tree’s association with beginnings becomes quite literal: Birch accompanies a new life at the beginning of its journey.

In the Scottish Highlands, Birch was also connected with fertility among cattle. A barren cow driven or herded with a birch stick was believed capable of becoming fertile, while its use with a pregnant cow was associated with the birth of a healthy calf. Birch therefore belonged not merely to symbolic renewal but to the continuation of life within the farming community.

The Highland birchwood had its own spiritual inhabitant. Ghillie Dhu, the solitary fairy of Scottish folklore, was said to dwell among birch trees. Remembered as a wild woodland being with a particular kindness towards children, his presence gives Birch another identity: not simply a tree possessing spiritual symbolism, but a place in which an entity could actually make its home.

Across northern Europe the folklore becomes different again. Birch branches remain deeply embedded in Finnish sauna tradition, where leafy whisks are used against the body as part of cleansing and healing. In older Finnish belief, even the wood chosen to heat the Christmas sauna mattered: burning Birch was said to help prevent misfortune during the coming year. Birch therefore carried cleansing from the body into the fortunes of the household itself.

There were stranger beliefs too. Unusual tangled growths in birch trees were associated in Finnish and Swedish-speaking folklore with the mara, the supernatural nightmare-being from which the English word nightmare ultimately derives. The distorted branches were imagined as evidence that the tree itself had been ridden by the night spirit. What modern botany recognises as abnormal growth could therefore become, within folklore, the physical footprint of a spiritual encounter.

Even birch sap accumulated its own customs. In northern tradition the first spring sap was associated with returning vitality after winter. One recorded Finnish custom had girls wash their faces with the first sap of spring, but only after tasting it, in the belief that this would protect their faces from burning during the coming summer. The tree awakening from winter was thus thought capable of passing something of its own renewed vitality to human life.

There is an intriguing natural companion to all of this folklore: the fly agaric, the unmistakable red-and-white mushroom frequently found growing with Birch. Birch and fly agaric form a genuine ecological relationship, and later traditions have connected the mushroom, birch woodland, altered states and the image of magical flight. Whatever interpretation is placed upon those later stories, the sight itself is ancient and distinctive — the white trunks of Birch rising above the scarlet caps of fly agaric on the woodland floor.

Birch folklore therefore forms an unusually coherent whole. Birth, fertility, cleansing, witchcraft, fairies, healing, nightmares, winter and renewal all gather around the same tree. The legends differ from country to country, but again and again Birch appears where something is being cleared away and something else is beginning. That makes its position at the opening of the Ogham sequence particularly appropriate: Birch does not merely symbolise the beginning — generations of folklore have placed it at the moment when one state of existence gives way to another.