White stripes: birch doing their thing

WIW 4 / Jan 23

Photograph: Richard Bloom

Where It Works Winter Garden at Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire (nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/cambridgeshire/anglesey-abbey-gardens-and-lode-mill)

Why It Works I don’t really remember when silver birches became so notorious, so well used. But I do remember going to many of the flower shows in the late 1990s and 2000s, and multistem Betula were always being planted.

They seemed to be tucked into every show garden corner, designers scrubbing the white trunks to make them stand out just that bit more. A little woodland planting underneath and suddenly the art of ticking the ‘layered planting’ box was….hopefully…. ticked. (It actually wasn’t properly ticked, but by using birch people felt that they were bringing something exciting and different to their display. It ended up that everyone was doing the same thing so there wasn’t that much excitement or that much difference. Note: fast forward 10 years and it’s Amelanchier lamarckii being used in the same vein, but I’ll talk about that fabulous tree another time…..)

And birch, of course, are genuinely great trees. They grow in so many places and seem to work in whatever scheme – whether it’s wanting a contemporary edge to an historic setting or an historic atmosphere in a contemporary design. With more than 50 species listed in the Hillier Manual of Trees and Shrubs, and hundreds of cultivars, their stems range from blushes to off cream to white. Erect and tall through to more pendulous, birch remain a garden and landscape favourite. And rightly so.

But perhaps the most important consideration is when birch work well the best. Is it singularly or en masse? Mid winter or height of summer? Spring or autumn colour? We’ve probably all seen beautiful specimens of one tree growing on its own, the thin tipped branches swaying in the wind and the catkins hanging. Yet this photo from the Winter Garden at Anglesey Abbey takes birch to another level – to a combined horticultural and sculptural level.

Their white stems are like Joel Dommett’s teeth - clean, white, sparkling… and rather difficult to ignore.

In a way, this birch grove at Anglesey Abbey, comprising power-washed Betula utilis var. jaquemontii, is the money shot. It’s the culmination of a 450m-long walk, where plants and winter-interest combinations get you warmed up. Created towards the end of the 1990s (some reports say 1996, others 1998), the Birch Grove is the full stop at the end of a long winter-focused paragraph.

Walking through winter-stemmed dogwoods, snowdrops, Tilia cordata ‘Winter Orange’, flowering viburnums, iris and hellebores, it’s a gentle stroll on flat land through a refreshing take on winter colour. But when you get to the end, the birch sing, dance, shout, jive and strut like nothing before it. Their white stems are like Joel Dommett’s teeth - clean, white, sparkling and rather difficult to ignore.

So the birch ‘work’. Of course they do. It is no more simple than using the plants given to us on our earth, repeated, and made into a statement. The birch selection is good, of course, but the simplicity of the repeat; of the curving path bisecting it; the hooped edging; and the planting before hand. That’s the clever bit. That’s why it works.

Chris Young

What do you think? Does this birch grove work for you? Or do you think it soulless, maybe a bit boring? Could it be better? Or is it simplicity enough, a perfect execution of what you want in the winter? Let me know and leave a comment.