On "Black Friday" I took a trip to Canada to shop for some birch. We'd been contacted a few weeks before by a nursery that had a surplus of Himalayan Birch (Betula jacquemontii) that had grown too large for them to dig up for their landscaping customers. There are many different species of birch with white bark, and Himalayan Birch has the whitest bark of them all.
After a few hours of driving, exchanging 20 US dollars for 17 Canadian dollars and change, and watching hordes of cars headed south, we arrived at the nursery. The birch looked amazing. The trunks and side branches were spectacularly white down to about a half inch in diameter, whereas the White Birch we currently sell, Betula papyrifera, is rarely white below an inch-and-a-half diameter. The diameter of the Himalayan Birch tops out at around 2" in short sections, so we'll probably be selling them in 3-4 foot lengths, rather than the 6-8 foot lengths used for the heavier Betula papyrifera. We hope to get a large batch of trees in the next few weeks, and have them processed and available for purchase in early January.
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