Thence, we drove a few miles across a swamp, along a raised shell road, with a canal on one hand and a dense wood on the other; and here and there, in the distance, a ragged and angular-limbed and moss-bearded cypress, top standing out, clear cut against the sky, and as quaint of form as the apple-trees in Japanese pictures—such was our course and the surroundings of it.
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
A strange silty fellow, that Taxodium distichum (baldcypress), standing tall along streams, deltas, flood plains, growing spectacularly in standing water, great fat trunks swelling like freakish barrels as they tower over their murky domain, mysterious knees rising around them like primordial henchmen. Ye shall find the king of the swamps to be a generous lord; cloaked in fashionable Spanish moss and resurrection ferns which offer forage to yellow-throated warblers, its tops giving roosts to bald eagles and ospreys, broken trunks and limbs giving spawning sites for catfish. The extinct Carolina parakeet once feasted on baldcypress seeds; today, it
feeds wild turkeys, squirrels, evening grosbeaks, and wood ducks. The native range stretches far, cypress groves spilling from coastal Delaware down to Florida, westward to Oklahoma and Texas, and traveling upriver into our midwestern homeland.a
This aquatic affinity in mind, your intuition might incline to suppose the baldcypress stuck in the swamp, relegated to wet areas. The contrarian conifer thinks otherwise, thriving in drier spots, standing up and showing out as a street tree, and triumphing in any soil type excepting high pH.
One of the finest notes of color from Secrest’s autumn show comes from our deciduous conifer twopiece, Taxodium distichum and Metasequoia glyptostroboides (dawn redwood) letting down a marvelous shower of rust-colored needles, blanketing the turf off Green Drive in a copper carpet.
While the fluted stems of Taxodium present a timber defect, the tree’s heartwood, dubbed ‘the Wood Eternal’ possesses a legendary durability and resistance to rot: light, easy to work with, does not shrink or warp. One of the few conifers that may be coppiced, baldcypress timber may be used for shingles or any other construction requiring weatherproof staunchness. Lacking pigments or substances that could influence flavoring, baldcypress lumber lends itself particularly well to cooperage.
Baldcypress is monoecious, producing male and female cones on the same tree. The genus Taxodium means ‘yew-like’ and the species ‘distichum’ is Latin for ‘couplet,’ denoting the two rows on which the leaves grow. Its pollen is shed in early spring prior to leafing out, dangling catkins of reddish-brown fertilizing conelet clusters of twos and threes.
The surface roots of our rex paludis (king of the swamp) produce a unique botanical enigma: vertical extensions known as cypress knees. Many theories have been ventured concerning the purpose of the cypress knees: carbohydrate storage, nutrient acquisition, mechanical support, vegetative reproduction, methane emission, and aeration. Concluding studies have all disproved these hypotheses. While the precise function of the knees remains sleuth-proof, decaying knees provide nesting cavities for prothonotary warblers, and the warblers exist in highest densities in baldcypress-tupelo stands. For the moment, the cypress knee shall remain a bewitching sight and a bewildering mystery, but the majesty of the tree is as plain a case as the Purloined Letter.
Hough, R. B., & Frey, C. (2002). The wood book reprint of the American woods (1888 - 1913, 1928)
Snyder, P. W. (2020, May 13). We Speak For the Knees?. Buckeye Yard and Garden Online. https://bygl.osu.edu/node/1563
Toliver, J. R., & Wilhite, L. P. (n.d.). Baldcypress. USDA. https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/misc/ag_654/volume_1/taxodium/distichum...
–Alexander Juri Lavrisha, Plant Materials Specialist, Secrest Arboretum lavrisha5@osu.edu