Latin Name: Betula papyrifera
Grows to 70 feet tall with an average diameter of 20
Color: Brown heartwood and white sapwood
Properties: average weight, fine texture

Tooth picks, Popsicle sticks, tongue depressors and wooden crutches - what do all of these have in common? A wood resilient to breakage - white birch!

The lowly tooth pick relegated to picking particles from our teeth; the Popsicle stick placed in the mouths of children; the tongue depressor used by the doctor confidently pressing down on your tongue; the wooden crutch used by an injured person (possibly recovering from an litigious injury of some sort); the chair holding a two hundred and fifty pound body upright, leaning backward and forward, comfortably sitting for many an hour at the dining room table. Yes, white birch is the one wood that can be relied upon for its resiliency. It will bend, but very rarely break.

The great 1998 ice storm that hit New England gives notorious testimony to the least brittle of the hard woods - white birch. Even now a year later, as one travels about the State of New Hampshire, especially in the Lake Sunapee area, one still sees those once tall, ubiquitous white birches bent over like fish poles, their uppermost branches only inches from the ground, their spirit bent but not broken, hoping one day to again be tall, upright, strong and straight. It renews the confidence that the wood of preference in the building of Windsor chairs is white birch.

Roger Scheffer, Straw Hill Chairs