Birch, the first lunar month in the Celtic Tree Calendar, coincides with the new growth cycle that begins with first light after the winter solstice. Spanning the days between December 24 and January 20, the month is dedicated to renewal and recovery.
The birch is singularly suited for that distinction.
Despite its elegant, pendulous branches, emerald-green leaves, and silvery-white bark, the birch flourishes in harsh conditions of low-nutrient soil and cold climates. Because the tree tends to grow in clusters, one or two seedlings can populate an entire forest in a few decades. The birch is also one of the first trees to sprout leaves as winter gives ways to spring.
Known by ecologists as a pioneer plant, the birch is often among the first flora to sprout in a barren environment. It can quickly reforest landscapes devastated by natural disasters, like wildfires, floods, and mudslides; or climate-related extinction events, like an ice age.
It was one of the first trees to recolonize the ice-scoured moraines of Ireland after the last glaciers receded about 13,000 years ago. It thrives in transition zones, i.e., between wood and field, thus attracting a multitude of insects that, in turn, support other wildlife.
This association with new life—and thus, fertility—has earned the tree the moniker of Lady of the Woods, or Mother of the Woods.
Mother Provides
When the first humans arrived in Ireland some 10,000 years ago, they looked to the resourceful, and thus magical, Mother Birch for warmth, shelter, furnishings, food, medicine, and crafts.
Unlike other hardwoods, birch can be burned damp and unseasoned. The outer bark is full of volatile oils, which generates a quick fire, and makes the bark waterproof. It has been used to fashion drinking vessels, baskets, canoe skins, and roofing tiles.
Though pliable, its wood does not bend like a reed. Rather, it is tough, heavy, and straight-grained—a suitable material for tools, furniture, and toys. In earlier times, birch twigs and branches produced good thatch for roofing, wattle for walls, and bedding when heather was scarce.
While good for smoking foods and tanning leather, the tree also provides food and medicine. Flour can be milled from the inner bark; young leaves can be eaten; tea can be brewed from root bark, leaves, or branch tips; and the sap can be drunk fresh, boiled into syrup (think birch beer), and distilled into beer and wine.
The sap treated skin irritations and consumption, i.e., tuberculosis. The leaves, with their antiseptic and diuretic qualities, cured urinary tract infections and constipation. Leaves and sap were used for kidney stones, rheumatism, and gout.
Photo by JJ Murphy, The Joyful Forager, 2024
The bark contains wintergreen (methyl salicylate), a pain reliever similar to aspirin. Used as a compress, the bark alleviated joint and muscular pain. Birch bark tar oil also contains high concentrations of terpenoid phenols that are potent antimicrobial, antibacterial, and antioxidant agents.
Birch bark tar oil was used as chewing gum 5,000 years ago and today is found as a flavoring agent in chewing gums, mints, and mouthwash. In addition to its medicinal properties, the substance served as a lubricant, an adhesive, and a decorative paint some 200,000 years ago.
It’s also effective at repelling gastropods.
The bark was sometimes twisted into wicks, and the twigs into brooms. While gardeners still use birch brooms (besoms) to purify their gardens, witches use them for their archetypal broomsticks. Striking criminals with bundles of birch twigs was a form of corporal punishment known as birching.
Tree Alphabet
Beithe (pronounced bey) is the Gaelic word for birch. It comes from the Proto-Indo-European root word bhereg-, meaning “to shine, bright, white,” and is also associated with the Sanskrit word bhurga, which means “tree whose bark was used for writing on.”
Beithe is the first tree of the Ogham, the Celtic Tree Alphabet.
According to Ogham Academy founder and instructor Lora O’Brien, trees were powerful in ancient Celtic culture, and were thus assigned to letters of the Ogham alphabet.
Birch/Beith represents the regenerative qualities that are necessary to begin again in a new year, after a trauma, or a negative period has passed.
The Celtic Tree Alphabet visually expressed the sounds of the Primitive Irish language. Developed somewhere close to 300 AD, it reached its Classical Period between 400 AD and 600 AD, and entered its Scholastic Period around 700 AD, when the monks featured it in their manuscripts.
In his book, The White Goddess (1948), Robert Graves conceived the Celtic Tree Calendar. Using the Ogham alphabet, he assigned a tree to each lunar month.
Celtic Tree Calendar
| Birch (Beithe) | December 24 – January 20 | New beginnings, purification, growth |
| Rowan (Luis) | January 21 – February 17 | Protection, intuition, spiritual insight |
| Ash (Nion) | February 18 – March 17 | Harmony, balance, healing |
| Alder (Fearn) | March 18 – April 14 | Balance, courage, inner strength |
| Willow (Saille) | April 15 – May 12 | Intuition, emotions, flexibility |
| Hawthorn (Huath) | May 13 – June 9 | Love, fertility, longevity |
| Oak (Duir) | June 10 – July 7 | Strength, endurance, wisdom |
| Holly (Tinne) | July 8 – August 4 | Security, resilience, spiritual strength |
| Hazel (Coll) | August 5 – September 1 | Inspiration, knowledge, creativity |
| Vine (Muin) | September 2 – September 29 | Joy, celebration, abundance |
| Ivy (Gort) | September 30 – October 27 | Adaptability, transformation, compassion |
| Reed (Ngetal) | October 28 – November 23 | Protection, reflection, maturity |
| Elder (Ruis) | November 24 – December 23 | Healing, transformation, wisdom |
But Birch’s significance goes beyond the first month of the year. It was often used to create the Beltainne maypole. Dancing around it would ensure a fruitful harvest. On Midsummer’s Eve, branches from the tree would be hung around doors to guard against misfortune. And on Samhain, evil spirits were brushed from homes using a birch-twig broom.
Birches
Robert Frost, 1874 –1963
In his poem “Birches,” Robert Frost identifies himself as “a swinger of birches,” concluding that, “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” In a nostalgic moment of renewal, he captures the bending of birch trunks as a metaphor for aspiring to reach heaven while still enjoying the pull of earth.
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust–
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows–
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
From The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1916, 1923, 1928, 1930, 1934, 1939, 1947, 1949, © 1969 by Holt Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright 1936, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1951, 1953, 1954, © 1956, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1962, 1967, 1970 by Leslie Frost Ballantine.
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