Location: Gallery, Woodland Trail, Four Rounds

River birch (Betula nigra) is a beautiful medium-sized shade tree that provides year-round interest to the landscape thanks to its showy exfoliating bark and graceful rounded branch habit. River birch grows 60 to 80 feet tall at maturity and about 40 feet wide. Although it naturally forms a single trunk, it is frequently grown in multiple-trunked form with two to five trunks per tree. Look around at the Patio and you will see both the single and multiple stem forms. As the name implies, its natural habitat is generally along stream banks, and it is most abundant in the hot, humid southeastern United States, but can be found from New England to northern Florida, and as far west as southern Minnesota and east Texas. It is one of the best fast-growing shade trees, and one of the most culturally adaptable and heat tolerant.

–Mike Burke, from the Glenstone Field Guide