Betula lentaL.

sweet birch

WFO wfo-0000334091 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Betula lenta, photographed by Mark Apgar
fig. a Mark Apgar, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-14 / obs. 197658799
Betula lenta, photographed by Lynn Harper
fig. b Lynn Harper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 196054426
Betula lenta, photographed by Tom Pollard
fig. c Tom Pollard, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 205232966
Betula lenta, photographed by Lynn Harper
fig. d Lynn Harper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 193832317
Betula lenta, photographed by Lynn Harper
fig. e Lynn Harper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 196641797
Betula lenta, photographed by Violet T.
fig. f Violet T., CC BY 4.0 / obs. 199827928
Betula lenta, photographed by Lynn Harper
fig. g Lynn Harper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 192135881
Betula lenta, photographed by Lynn Harper
fig. h Lynn Harper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 191916744

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 49 observations

Peak flowering in Apr, from 49 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 11 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Betula carpinifolia Ehrh.
  • Betula excelsa Hook.
  • Betula humilis Marshall
  • Betula lenta f. laciniata Rehder
  • Betula lenta subsp. lenta
  • Betula lenta subsp. uber (Ashe) A.E.Murray
  • Betula lenta var. genuina Regel
  • Betula lenta var. humilis (Marshall) Castigl.
  • Betula lenta var. persicifolia Dippel
  • Betula lenta var. uber Ashe
  • Betula uber (Ashe) Fernald

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.