European White Birch Betula pendula
European White Birch is an introduced perennial tree, found in Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 60 ft and blooms Apr in part shade – shade, with brown fruit.
More about this plant
Betula pendula, commonly known as silver birch, warty birch, European white birch, or East Asian white birch, is a species of tree in the family Betulaceae, native to Europe and parts of Asia, though in southern Europe, it is only found at higher altitudes. Its range extends into Siberia, China, and southwest Asia in the mountains of northern Turkey, the Caucasus, and northern Iran. It has been introduced into North America, where it is known as the European white birch or weeping birch and is considered invasive in some states in the United States and parts of Canada. Wikipedia →
European White Birch is flagged invasive in the U.S. These natives fill a similar niche — same growth habit, bloom season, height, and region — so you keep the look and feed local wildlife instead of spreading a problem.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- High moisture
- Soil pH
- 5–7.5
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 4+
- Drought tolerance
- Low
- Shade tolerance
- Low
- Wet-soil tolerance
- Low waterlogging
- Height
- 60 ft
- Mature width
- ≈ 40 ft wide open-grown · ~24 ft in the wild
- Spacing
- 8–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Thicket-forming
- Lifespan
- Perennial · short-lived
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · fine texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Brown
- Propagate by
- Seed, Cuttings, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Summer seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- Yes regrows after top-kill
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
✦ Bees 3 bee visitors
3 native & managed bee species are documented visiting European White Birch :
Wildlife & visitors 11 birds · 1 mammal · 12 nectaring
Open records of who else uses European White Birch — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 11 birds and 1 mammal species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
+ 1 more species → ↑ show fewer
12 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
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 (38) 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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