Wood id on Jeffs lot

So there are several trees on my property that i can't readily ID myself. So i thought id start a thread to post all my ID pictures in one place instead of a buncha different threads.

Here's the first. I'm thinking black birch but it's not common around here. Asked my dad today and he said river birch? I asked if he meant the flakey one and he said yes. He didn't know anything about a black birch he said.

 

None of that around me unless planted as ornamental.

 

No guarantees on the app.

 

That looks like fire (pin) cherry to me.

 

Looks like pin cherry. Heavy flowering and really small fruit.

 

I'll have to keep an eye on it this spring. Wouldn't surprise me if it's some kinda cherry. The others i thought were black birch are young black cherry with the bark still smooth.

 

Black birch bark will start getting rough at around that size, and form plates that start peeling away horizontally. Pin cherry stays smooth like that until it dies out.

 

Black birch with aging bark:


Young black birch:


Black birch (betula lenta) is sometimes called cherry birch because young trees strongly resemble cherry.

 

Its definitely not that from what i can tell. I think you guys are probably right on the pin cherry.

 

Scratch and sniff the smooth bark with a nail. If it smells like wintergreen, it's black birch.

 

Looking at the first picture my mind went to aspen but the second picture looks a bit darker.

 

Im not seeing black birch as i know it. It was called choke cherry since i was a kid. Sometimes wounds from them would bleed a transluscent jelly like substance.

 

I never got the smell of winter green. To me it smells just like birch beer soda. We have tons of black birch saplings here that I battle every summer to trim back.

 

Looks a little bit like golden birch. It too smells like wintergreen if you scratch the bark, especially younger shoots. It's normally quite yellow with the sun shining on it though.
That doesn't appear to have much of the little bit of peeling birch usually does even though some birch doesn't have much.

 

We've got nothing like that here in Wisconsin.

 

Mature river birch?

 

Sassafras smells like root/birch beer. To me, anyways.

 

Looks like fire cherry to me. I have a bunch of them growing in my grove of white (paper) birch. They are trash trees in my opinion, they get big quickly and then fall over and wreck a bunch of good trees nearby. I take them out when they get big enough to cut into firewood.

 

We have one in the backyard that birds planted. Was told a type of cherry (crab-cherry) sticks in my mind and does have small fruit that's mostly pits.
One of these years I'll get rid of it as it's starting to rub on the shed.

 

Bark’s wrong for black birch. It’s a cultivar of Prunus avium (sweet cherry).