Medicine Chest - birch bark (saves the day)

Don't read this if you're squeamish about feet. 'Cause this is (partly) about feet stuff. Winter weary feet, to be precise. It's about hair, too. Winter weary hair.

But if you have feet, or hair, or even both, and they're troubling you at all, you might want to read on.


Birch bark and feet:

"Look after your feet" is one of my 93 yr old Dad's bits of advice for a long and healthy life, and considering the old codger still goes for an hour long walk every day, I'd say he's got a right to be giving out advice. (The other gem he likes to offer to anyone who will listen is "work hard, eat soup every day and don't take pills!")

I have strong feet, always have. I've been barefoot since I learned how to untie my shoes when my mother wasn't looking and spent most summer days of my childhood with my sneakers, laces tied together, hanging over one shoulder so I could ramble barefooted through prairie and bush and along gravel roads. Feet like leather.

And I like it that way.

All spring, summer, and fall my feet are treated to fresh air and sun and our dew soaked lawn of clovers and chickweed and selfheal and creeping charlie and dandelions and plantain and violets, so come wintertime, deprived, they start to get unhappy. Having to wear socks (oh ugh how I hate socks) and boots to go outside, and sometimes even slippers in the house (oh the horror!) the normally supple skin on my feet has thickened up, dried out, and even split.

You know what a searing little pain a paper cut can be, right? That's what it feels like I have on my feet starting about the middle of February. Paper cuts. On the sides of my feet. Ow.

It's been particularly bad this year, even with liberal slatherings of home made plantain balm twice a day. I got so desperate that I was even considering the "Listerine cure". (Apparently, soaking one's feet in Listerine will remove dead skin. And if that's true, it does not bear thinking about what it would do to the inside of one's mouth .. yikes!)

But then, browsing through one of my Matthew Wood herbal books for something else, it fell open to the section on birch (Betula spp.) (blurb here) and one of the indications for use jumped off the page at me:

"Hard, indurated, mineralized skin."

That's exactly my feet!

And what do I have right at my fingertips? Firewood! So of course I rooted through the pile by the woodstove and eureka, a log of yellow birch! Several, actually! Yeehaw!

Now, granted, our esteemed friend Matthew Wood is referring, as most herbal information on the use of birch medicinally does, to Betula alba or Betula lenta (white or sweet birch, respectively) but the best birch for the job (I figure) is the one you've got, so I set about peeling myself some bark of my Betula alleghaniensis. Talk about the Doctrine of Signatures in action - the outer bark looked an awful lot like the state my feet were in - rough, peeling, cracked - and underneath, the inner bark (the part we use) was smooooooth and strong and supple, just like I want my feet to be.

Gawd I was so excited. Not only did I know (not just "hope", not just "think", but KNOW) that this was the solution to my problem, the act of foraging through the woodpile, getting out my trusty pen knife and peeling the bark was just the ticket for my winter weary cabin-feverish soul.

I put a good sized handful (keep in mind I have rather small hands) of  bark peelings in a goodly amount of water and brought it to a very low boil. Turned it down and let it just barely simmer for oh, maybe half and hour or 45 minutes, lid off so it would reduce some. Then we had to go out for the day so I turned off the heat, put the lid on and let it steep for the duration. By the time we got home I had a beautiful deep golden coloured liquid that smelled woodsy with a hint of the smell of moose hide to it. Just gorgeous.

I strained about 4 of cups of that into a big round basin in my kitchen sink, topped it up with warm water, got up on the counter and stuck my feet in it. Ahhhhh.

My feet almost immediately turned quite red.

Ooooh, I wondered briefly, did I make it too strong? Whatever. It felt good. Powerful. Rubbing the soles, heels and sides of my feet gently with a terry washcloth I kept them there for only about 10 minutes. That seemed like enough. Dried them off. They felt .. healed. And they were, are, the "paper cuts" were and have remained sealed shut. Amazing.

But all those peeling layers of thick dry skin were still there! Damn.

After a while, though, once they'd air dried really well, I noticed a real difference in the consistency of that dry skin. It had become flaky. Crispy, even. I (gently, ever so gently) rubbed a pumice stone in circles over my feet and it all came off like dust.

It's a bonafide miracle, I tell you.

The skin on my feet became smoooooth and strong and supple again. Beat that, Listerine.

The decoction probably needn't be made as strong as I made it, and when I used the leftovers for a second round the next evening, I diluted it a bit more. After that second round, my feet continued to improve without bathing them further - interesting, yes? I give them a little 'sanding down' once in a while and it seems like the plantain ointment, which I'm continuing to use, is able to penetrate much better and keep them soft.

Birch bark and hair:

Elsewhere in the blurb linked above, Wood makes mention that birch has a long history of use as a hair tonic. He relates that a girl he met with some of the thickest, healthiest hair he'd ever seen had originally had thin, spindly locks until her mother began rinsing it with nettles and birch. I already use nettle infused apple cider vinegar for my hair every few washes - a glug of the vinegar to a basin of water for a rinse and soak after I shampoo removes any shampoo residue, keeps the scalp in great shape, makes my hair grow faster and gives it great body - so I was curious to see if the birch could improve on all that.

Well hot diggedy, it sure did.

Now hair comes in many types, and as I've learned the hard way (I'm looking at you, rice water!) what serves for one person's hair does NOT translate to everyone's, so bear with me as we tangent off into talking about mine (lol) so you can gauge whether birch might be right for yours.

My hair is fine textured. There's plenty of it, but each individual strand is very fine, yet strong. It's naturally kinda multicoloured, changing with the seasons (variations on a blonde/light brown in summer to slightly auburn when it doesn't get any sun) with some silver coming in. No dye - ever - and it's down to about the bottom of my shoulder blades. It does tangle pretty easily if I don't keep it in a braid, it takes forever to dry, and if I try to use a hair dryer it just turns to straw. I have yet to find a conditioner that doesn't make my hair flat and icky looking so I don't bother with any, just the afore mentioned vinegar rinse and the occasional (home made) mayonnaise treatment. My shampoo is the cheapo nothin' fancy store brand.

For the birch treatment I added about a quarter cup of the leftovers of my decoction, along with the vinegar, to the rinse and soak. My hair loved it. LOVED it. For some reason it dried faster, and it felt really wonderfully thick. It didn't tangle as much either. I'm definitely sold. The healthy tone has stayed, too, just like with my feet, so it's probably something I'll only have to do occasionally to see the benefit of - and I will definitely want to use it regularly.

Birch and other stuff:

Birch has many, many uses. There are references "out there" on the interwebz to a stunning cure of a nasty case of necrotising herpes zoster - oh my that sounds awful doesn't it? With this one experience with my feet I can easily see how it would both cleanse and heal something even that drastic. Shingles, even when not "necrotising", are brutal, and MD's don't have much in their black bags to help. Isn't nature grand? She seems to have a remedy for everything.

Birch bark or in some cases birch leaves have traditional use internally for kidney and bladder issues, digestive distress, gall bladder problems, menstrual issues, as a mouthwash for bleeding gums .. the list goes on and on, so do follow the link I left above and I'll put a couple more below.

Last but not least, the inner bark of birch, which already has a pleasantly oily quality to it, can be infused into an oil for topical use. Yet another tree/bark remedy for the general aches and pains of muscles and joints, something to add to my ever growing repertoire along with comfrey, St John'swort, aspen and alder oils? I'm in! I'll do a followup post on the results of that.

Our firewood is two years old and that bark I used was excellent quality, so it's clear this is one bark that need not be used fresh off a living tree. However, unlike other barks I've worked with, it seems that it doesn't store all that well once peeled, I suppose because the oils dry out. I peeled a large batch and stored it in a paper bag - a jar would probably have been better. It was still fine, just not quite as fragrant and slightly less moisturizing. 

Aren't you glad you have me to do the trial and error stuff so you don't have to?

If you don't happen to have logs kicking around in your house or yard (I guess not everyone does, ha!) have a look for those little bags of firewood they often have for sale outside hardware stores and gas stations (not the kiln dried stuff though, just regular old firewood, like for a campfire). There's probably a log or two of birch in there. Whatever you do, please do NOT peel the bark off a living tree, it will die a slow death, and we don't want that on our consciences do we ..

If you can't source any birch cut for firewood, you can try this neat trick:

"The next time you happen to go to the forest, you should kick in a fallen birch tree with your foot: the inside of the tree will collapse, but the bark will stay intact." source


More links:

A surprisingly knowledgeable naturopath (you know how I usually feel about them, but here's a happy exception.)

Adam Hariton (of Learn Your Land website and youtube channel, both excellent)

https://www.madeofbirchbark.com/birch-bark/ - buy really cool stuff made of birch bark here. I'm linking to their article on uses and collecting, but do have a look at their lovely merchandise. I'm tempted by some of their containers, wow. (So .. if anyone wants to buy me a present ..)

And here's Elder Bertha Skye discussing how her people used birch bark tea: