Cultural Significance
Silver Birch is Finland's national tree. Occasionally one uses leafy, fragrant boughs of Silver Birch to gently beat oneself in a sauna. The boughs are called vihta or vasta. This has a relaxing effect on the muscles.
Land of the Silver Birch is a traditional Canadian folk song, though the birch referred to is actually a different species, Paper Birch Betula papyrifera.
In Sweden, the bark of birch trees was ground up and used to make a form of bread. The removal of bark was at one time so widespread that Carl Linnaeus expressed his concern for the survival of the woodlands.
Read more about this topic: Betula Pendula
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or significance:
“Somehow we have been taught to believe that the experiences of girls and women are not important in the study and understanding of human behavior. If we know men, then we know all of humankind. These prevalent cultural attitudes totally deny the uniqueness of the female experience, limiting the development of girls and women and depriving a needy world of the gifts, talents, and resources our daughters have to offer.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)