Bog Birch Betula pumila
Bog Birch is a perennial shrub native to Canada, the lower 48 states, and Saint-Pierre & Miquelon. It grows to 20 ft and blooms Apr in part shade – shade. A keystone plant for native insects and the food web.
More about this plant
Betula pumila is a deciduous shrub native to North America. Bog birch occurs over a vast area of northern North America, from Yukon in the west to New England in the east and all the way to Washington and Oregon, inhabiting swamps and riparian zones in the boreal forests. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 5.1–8.5
- Fertility need
- Low
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 4+
- Height
- 20 ft
- Mature width
- ~ 17 ft wide DERIVED derived estimate — open-grown crown allometry (height × growth-form ratio); not a measurement
- Spacing
- 4–8 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Multiple stems
- Lifespan
- Perennial · short-lived
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Propagate by
- Seed, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- High browsed readily
- 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 2 birds
Open records of who else uses Bog Birch — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 2 birds species (fruit, seed, browse):
How we know this (4) 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.
For woody plants that have a height but no measured crown, we estimate width = height × a crown-to-height ratio fit for that plant’s form (conifers narrower than broadleaf trees, shrubs widest), calibrated on our measured open-grown crowns and capped at the largest one ever measured. A measured crown always wins; herbaceous plants get nothing (no anchor).
Honest limits: A coarse class-median estimate for garden-scale spacing, not a measurement; woody single/multi-stem forms only.
Sources for this entry (34) 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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