Silver Birch- Edible

Silver Birch (betulina pendula)

Silver birch is an iconic tree in the British landscape. It’s a pioneer tree and is always the first tree to start a new woodland.

There are a number of edible parts to the Silver birch Firstly, in the first few weeks of March, you can harvest the sap from a mature Birch tree. You do this by either tapping the tree, which is why are you drill a small hole and use a straw to direct the sap to your container, or or you can cut a low branch and attach a container below, where you’ve cut which has a much more sympathetic method for the tree. You can also eat the very young leaves in a salad. They have a lovely lemon flavour.

Identification features for Silver birch

• It’s a tree with white bark that has black horizontal lines

• Birch, branches droop, so they point downwards

• The leaves are triangular with a jagged edge

• It has yellowy cream catkins, which appear between April and May, they hang in groups of 2 to 4 at the tips of the branches these are the male catkins, female captains, are shorter and green.

If you have all of these features, it’s likely you’ve got a silver birch.

Lookalikes

Downey birch, 

paper birch