Yellow Birch Betula alleghaniensis
Yellow Birch is a perennial tree native to Canada, the lower 48 states, and Saint-Pierre & Miquelon. It grows to 75 ft and blooms May in full sun – part shade, with brown fruit. A keystone plant for native insects and the food web.
More about this plant
Betula alleghaniensis, the yellow birch, golden birch, or swamp birch, is a large species of birch native to northeastern North America. Its vernacular names refer to the golden color of the tree's bark. In the past its scientific name was Betula lutea, the yellow birch. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 4–8
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 3+
- Drought tolerance
- Moderate
- Shade tolerance
- Moderate
- Wet-soil tolerance
- Low waterlogging
- Height
- 75 ft
- Mature width
- ≈ 35 ft wide wild/forest-grown — open-grown specimens spread wider
- Spacing
- 8–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Slow
- Growth form
- Single stem
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Brown persists into winter
- Propagate by
- Seed, Cuttings, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Summer seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Field collection only
- Deer browsing
- Medium moderately palatable
- Resprouts if cut
- No
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~411 caterpillar species · keystone genus
Betula supports ~411 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a powerhouse genus.
Recorded feeding on Betula in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
Wildlife & visitors 3 birds · 4 mammals
Open records of who else uses Yellow Birch — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 3 birds and 4 mammals species (fruit, seed, browse):
+ 1 more species → ↑ show fewer
Across 224 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Yellow Birch, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (39) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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