30 
PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE 
a barque or boat (from which we also get our word “ barge ”), 
and so the very name carries us to those early times when the 
Birch was considered one of the most useful of trees, as it still 
is in most northern countries, where it grows at a higher degree 
of latitude than any other tree. Its bark was especially useful, 
being useful for cordage, and matting, and roofing, while the 
tree itself formed the early British canoes, as it still forms the 
canoes of the North American Indians, for which it is well 
suited, from its lightness and ease in working. 
In Northern Europe it is the most universal and the most 
useful of trees. It is “the superlative tree in respect of the 
ground it covers, and in the variety of purposes to which it 
is converted in Lapland, where the natives sit in birchen huts 
on birchen chairs, wearing birchen boots and breeches, with 
caps and capes of the same material, warming themselves by 
fires of birchwood charcoal, reading books bound in birch, and 
eating herrings from a birchen platter, pickled in a birchen 
cask. Their baskets, boats, harness, and utensils are all of 
Birch; in short, from cradle to coffin, the Birch forms the 
peculiar environment of the Laplander.” 1 In England we 
still admire its graceful beauty, whether it grows in our woods 
or our gardens, and we welcome its pleasant odour on our 
Russia leather bound books; but we have ceased to make 
beer from its young shoots, 2 and we hold it in almost as low 
repute (from the utilitarian point of view) as Turner and 
Shakespeare seem to have held it. 
1 “Gardener’s Chronicle.” 
2 “ Although, beer is now seldom made from birchen twigs, yet it is by 
no means an uncommon practice in some country districts to tap the white 
trunks of Birches, and collect the sweet sap which exudes from them for 
wine-making purposes. In some parts of Leicestershire this sap is collected 
in large quantities every spring, and birch wine, when well made, is a 
wholesome and by no means an unpleasant beverage.”'—B. in The Garden , 
April, 1877. “The Finlanders substitute the leaves of Birch for those 
of the tea-plant; the Swedes extract a syrup from the sap, from which 
they make a spirituous liquor. In London they make champagne of it. 
The most virtuous uses to which it is applied are brooms and wooden 
shoes .”—A Tour Round My Garden, Letter xix. 
