The birch, Betula, is a slender tree of white or silvery peeling bark, one of the first to colonise bare and burnt ground and among the hardiest of northern trees, reaching to the edge of the Arctic. Its pale grace earned it the name the lady of the woods, and its qualities of pioneering new growth and shining bark made it, across northern Europe, a tree of beginnings, purification and renewal. It is the first letter, Beith, of the ogham, the early Irish tree-alphabet, standing at the head of the sequence as the birch stands first on the cleared ground.
Birch bark's thin, waterproof, easily separated layers made it one of the most versatile writing and building materials of the pre-industrial world in several unrelated traditions at once: Sanskrit and other Indian manuscripts were for centuries written on prepared birch bark, bhurja patra, and in medieval Russia many hundreds of everyday birch bark letters, preserved in the wet clay of Novgorod and excavated from the 1950s onward, have given historians an unmatched record of ordinary literacy stretching back to the eleventh century, quite apart from the tree's use by North American peoples to build the light, flexible birch bark canoe.