Why Is Karelian Birch So Hard to Grow?
Karelian birch wood texture. Source: iStock.com/eugenesergeev
From knife handles to furniture suites in imperial palaces, Karelian birch is a name familiar to anyone who collects antiques or fine furniture. The mere mention of the material stirs a particular excitement, and collectors know that when Karelian birch comes up, they should brace for a very high price.
PARTS
- Why Is Karelian Birch So Hard to Grow?
- Karelian Birch: How Belarus Became the Main Supplier of the “Karelian” Brand (out Friday, September 11)
That is surprising in its own way. Karelian birch is a tree that grows on its own in certain parts of Russia. So how did the wood of a fast-growing birch come to be worth its weight in gold, while Karelia itself grows no richer on that “gold”?
What Makes the Wood Special
Karelian birch (Betula pendula var. carelica) is a variety of silver birch (formerly warty birch, Betula verrucosa), a widely distributed species of the family Betulaceae found across Russia.
Karelian birch wood is prized in cabinetmaking for its unusual texture: fibers that normally grow parallel to one another instead twist into strange winding patterns, no two alike, producing a marbled figure. Such wood is noticeably denser than ordinary silver birch and far harder in every direction, resistant to rot, and difficult to work.
Furniture of Karelian birch combined with bog oak once furnished the imperial palaces. The chairs and desks in Nicholas II’s study were made of it, the Winter Palace and the Mikhailovsky Palace in St. Petersburg were fitted out with pieces in it, and the Pavlovsk Palace held an entire library furnished in the costly wood. That fashion—and the matching price of the material—earned Karelian birch the nickname of the tsar’s tree.
Karelian birch takes five forms, ranging in appearance from a full tree closely resembling an ordinary birch to a shrub. The most common and most recognizable form looks as though it grew in a swamp: short, with a crooked trunk (sometimes more than one), and spherical swellings on the branches.
Karelian Birch in Industry
Growing Karelian birch commercially is not as simple as it might seem. A number of pressing problems follow from the biology of the tree. For its first ten years it shows none of its distinctive traits, and it does not live long—about 40–60 years.
The traits responsible for the curling of the wood fibers are poorly inherited through seed (roughly 2–20% under uncontrolled pollination and up to 50–80% under controlled hybridization), which is why Karelian birch almost never forms stable natural stands, and why there are no groves of the precious tree to be found.
In 2024, scientists at the Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences identified the gene responsible for the figured wood, and can now determine at an early stage whether a given tree’s wood will be figured or not. The method is very expensive, however, and too laborious to use routinely.
Micropropagation
Geneticists and breeders appeared to have solved this problem too, through vegetative propagation—yet even cheap and quick grafting fails, because of differences in growth rate and genetic deviations in the birch. So the most reliable weapon in the breeder’s arsenal was brought to bear: micropropagation. It works, with a guaranteed result, but it is expensive as well.
In the Republic of Karelia, micropropagation of Karelian birch is carried out by the Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Major research on the species is also conducted at St. Petersburg State University, Voronezh State University, and the All-Russian Research Institute of Forest Genetics, Breeding and Biotechnology (VNIILGISbiotech) in Voronezh.
Micropropagation (in vitro) makes it possible to raise up to a hundred exact copies of a plant from a single bud of Karelian birch, each inheriting in full the winding grain and the appearance of the parent tree. Their survival, however, requires a sterile medium and purpose-built environmental conditions: an optimal balance of temperature, humidity, and light.
The main complication with this method of propagation is that young Karelian birch has no immunity. It is entirely unadapted to changing environmental conditions and to disease and pests alike.
A young plant needs hardening off and a strengthened immune system, so for several more years it is acclimatized first in greenhouses, then in fields, and only after that planted out. The survival rate of birches prepared this way is low and the planting stock costs a great deal, which often makes large-scale plantings of Karelian birch impossible. (And people being what they are—someone hears about a planting, drives out, cuts the trees down, and hauls them away.)
This is how Karelian birch acquires its high price. It is a very difficult species to grow, whether for landscaping or for commercial sale at scale. Proposals to plant this valuable tree around the republic and Petrozavodsk come up often, but in practice such initiatives prove unworkable.
The country needs to conserve the species and restore its protected stands—in many of them Karelian birch has survived only by a miracle—but the matter has been shelved. In Karelia, there is no talk of Karelian birch wood as a commodity with any real turnover.
