Plant of the Week
Bald Cypress
Latin: Taxodium distichum
 Looking out my office window every morning I enjoy the
majesty of a full-grown bald cypress that demonstrates mature trees, as well as
people, spread out as they get older.
Bald cypress, Taxodium distichum, is familiar to all southerners
because it grows along waterways and bayous in soft, moist ground throughout the
region. Its range is from Virginia into southern Illinois and Indiana, then
westward to the southern hill country of Texas. It never gets far from slow
moving, shallow rivers.
Bald cypress maintains a tolerance of cold and grows as far north a Maine and
Michigan when used in the landscape.
Leaves of bald cypress are small and needle-like and produced in random
arrangement along the small branches of the limbs. In late summer, they begin to
turn brown but are not shed until after the first frost.
Young trees grow ramrod straight and form narrow pyramids that have the
traditional Christmas tree shape of most young conifers. They usually top out at
between 90 and 120 feet on moist ground, 60 feet on dry sites.
Bald cypress 800 to 1,200 years old, while certainly rare, are known. Because
they were in inaccessible sites in the middle of a swamp, large scale commercial
logging did not begin much before 1880. Before that the only trees cut, some
with trunks 8 feet through, were along waterways.
But loggers soon learned that 80 percent of the bald cypress logs full of sap
were "sinkers," and they ended up embedded in the mud along the side of the
river. Bald cypress wood is incredibly durable and will resist decay for
centuries if not exposed to oxygen. This submerged wood is now being reclaimed
from southern river beds and being used for fine cabinetry.
David Stahle, a UofA geographer who studies climate change using tree ring
dating methods, has used bald cypress cores from standing and submerged trees to
look at the climatic record for the past 2,000 years.
In one of his most interesting studies, he demonstrated that the 116 settlers
that disappeared without a trace from Roanoke Island in 1587 had the misfortune
of trying to establish a new colony in the midst of the worst drought the region
had experienced in 800 years.
Standing cypress is one of the best anchored trees in our native woodlands.
Hurricanes along the southeastern coast will blow pines down in wide swaths,
leaving the fat trunks of bald cypress jutting skyward in a tangle of
destruction. This good anchorage, even though embedded in mud, is due to the
tangle of roots and "knees" at the base of the trees.
Knees were once thought to be important in oxygen exchange for the roots but
this notion has been discredited because researchers have cut away knees and
trees have suffered no ill effects. Knees form only in water or in saturated
ground, and are not present when trees grow in upland sites.
Looking at the swamps where bald cypress grow, the erroneous conclusion is
often reached that they must be planted in wet sites. Bald cypress, while it
needs standing water or saturated ground for seed germination, is drought
tolerant once established.
Container grown trees or year old seedlings are best used when planting bald
cypress in the landscape. They look most at home when planted in irregular
groups of five or more such that the length of the planting is greater than the
mature height of the trees. Young trees grow rapidly and usually average 2 feet
or more of growth a year.
By: Gerald Klingaman, retired
Extension Horticulturist
- Ornamentals
Extension News -
February 8, 2002
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