We’ve written before about how our prints start as hand-painted art before they ever become fabric. This time we wanted to slow down on three specific plants that come up again and again in our collections — silver birch, weeping birch, and snowbed willow — and explain why each one carries a genuinely different mood, rooted in what these plants actually are in Finnish nature.

Silver Birch: Finland’s National Tree

The silver birch (rauduskoivu) is Finland’s official national tree, chosen through public polls in the 1980s and ’90s alongside the country’s other national nature symbols. It makes up roughly a third of Finnish forests, and its white bark and light canopy are one of the most recognizable images of a Finnish summer — the tree Finns decorate their homes with on Midsummer’s Eve as a symbol of the season itself.

In Finnish and wider European folklore, birch has long stood for purity, renewal, and new beginnings. Our silver birch prints lean into that quieter symbolism: muted, restrained color palettes that echo the tree’s pale bark and calm presence rather than shouting for attention. It’s the print we’d point to if you want something that reads as understated and grounded — see it in our Silver Birch – Snowfall leggings.

Weeping Birch: The Same Tree, a Different Feeling

Weeping birch (riippakoivu) is a variety of the same species, distinguished by its drooping, cascading branches rather than an upright canopy — a shape that’s just as familiar across Finnish gardens and roadsides. Where our silver birch prints stay quiet, our weeping birch designs go the opposite direction: brighter, more colorful patterns built for summer, drawing on the movement and looseness of those hanging branches rather than the stillness of bark.

It’s the same national tree, told as a different story — the Weeping Birch – Soahki fairy-tale leggings and the Nordic Savannah design both carry that livelier, more playful energy.

Snowbed Willow: Small, Stubborn, and Built to Last

Snowbed willow (vaivaispaju) is about as far from a towering birch as a plant can get. It’s one of the smallest woody plants in the world, often just a few centimeters tall, growing as a creeping mat pressed close to the ground in some of the harshest terrain in the Arctic and subarctic — rocky moorland, tundra, the edges of snowbeds that only thaw for a few weeks a year. It survives by staying low, spreading through underground rhizomes, and simply enduring conditions that would kill almost anything else.

That’s the story we wanted in a print: not grandeur, but quiet persistence. Finns have a word for exactly this kind of unglamorous toughness — sisu — and it’s hard to find a better botanical match for it than a plant that’s figured out how to thrive at ground level in the Arctic. Our Snowbed Willow – Gironlasta leggings carry that same understated resilience into the print.

Why the Distinction Matters

It would be easy to lump all three under a vague “inspired by nature” label, but the plants themselves aren’t interchangeable, and neither are the moods they carry into a print — calm and grounded, bright and playful, or small and unshakeable. Knowing which one you’re drawn to is a decent shortcut to finding the print that actually matches how you want to feel wearing it.

Browse the full collection to see all three side by side, or read more about how our prints go from hand-painted art to fabric.