Taxodium distichum (baldcypress, bald-cypress, bald cypress, swamp cypress; French: cyprès chauve; cipre in Louisiana) is a deciduous conifer in the family Cupressaceae. It is native to the Southeastern United States. Hardy and tough, this tree adapts to a wide range of soil types, whether wet, salty, dry, or swampy. It is noted for the russet-red fall color of its lacy needles. It is both extremely flood tolerant and rather drought hardy. This plant has some cultivated varieties and is often used in groupings in public spaces. Common names include bald cypress, swamp cypress, white cypress, tidewater red cypress, gulf cypress, and red cypress. The bald cypress was designated the official state tree of Louisiana in 1963. Bald cypress trees are valued because of their rot-resistant heartwood when the trees are mature. Because of this, the trees are often used for making fence posts, doors, flooring, caskets, and a number of other items.
Description
Taxodium distichum is a large, slow to fast-growing, and long-lived tree. It typically grows to heights of 35–120 feet (10–40 m) and has a trunk diameter of 3–7 feet (0.9–2.1 m). The main trunk is often surrounded by cypress knees. The bark is grayish brown to reddish brown, thin, and fibrous with a stringy texture. Young trees have more easily-peelable bark. The needle-like leaves are 1⁄2 to 3⁄4 inch (1.3 to 1.9 cm) long and are simple, alternate, green, and linear, with entire margins. In autumn, the leaves turn yellow or copper red. The bald cypress is deciduous. This species is monoecious, with male and female cones on a single plant forming on slender, tassel-like structures near the edge of branchlets. The tree produces cones in April and the seeds ripen in October. The male and female strobili are produced from buds formed in late autumn, with pollination in early winter, and mature in about 12 months. Male cones emerge on panicles that are 4–5 inches (10–13 cm) inches long. Female cones are round, resinous and green while young. They then turn hard and then brown as the tree matures. They are globular and 2.0–3.5 cm (3⁄4–1+3⁄8 in) in diameter. They have from 20 to 30 spirally arranged, four-sided scales, each bearing one, two, or rarely three triangular seeds. Each cone contains 20 to 40 large seeds. The cones disintegrate at maturity to release the seeds. The seeds are 5–10 mm (3⁄16–13⁄32 in) long, the largest of any species of Cupressaceae, and are produced every year, with heavy crops every 3–5 years. The seedlings have three to nine, but usually six, cotyledons each.
The bald cypress grows in full sunlight to partial shade; it grows best in wet or well-drained soil, but can tolerate dry soil. It is moderately able to grow in aerosols of salt water. It does well in acid, neutral, and alkaline soils across the full range of light (sandy), medium (loamy), and heavy (clay) soils. It can also grow in saline soils. It can tolerate atmospheric pollution. The cones are often consumed by wildlife. The tallest known specimen, near Williamsburg, Virginia, is 44.11 m (145 ft) tall. The National Champion Bald Cypress is recognized as the largest member of its species in the country and is listed as such on the National Register of Champion Trees by American Forest. The National Champion Bald Cypress is in the Cat Island National Wildlife Refuge, near St. Francisville, Louisiana, and it is 96 feet (29 m) tall, 56 feet (17 m) in circumference, and is estimated to be approximately 1,500 years old. The oldest known living specimen, found along the Black River in North Carolina, is at least 2,624 years old, rendering it the oldest living tree in eastern North America. The Senator, a bald cypress in Longwood, Florida, was 165 feet (50 m) tall before the hurricane of 1925, when it lost about 40 feet (12 m) in height. It had a circumference of 47 feet (14 m) and a diameter of 17.5 feet (5.3 m) and was estimated to be 3,500 years old. It was burned down accidentally in 2012.
Taxonomy The closely related Taxodium ascendens (pond cypress) is treated by some botanists as a distinct species, while others classify it as merely a variety of bald cypress, as Taxodium distichum var. imbricatum (Nutt.) Croom. It differs in shorter leaves borne on erect shoots, and in ecology, being largely confined to low-nutrient blackwater habitats. A few authors also treat Taxodium mucronatum as a variety of bald cypress, as T. distichum var. mexicanum Gordon, thereby considering the genus as comprising only one species.
Habitat and distribution
The native range extends from southeastern New Jersey south to Florida and west to Central Texas and southeastern Oklahoma, and also inland up the Mississippi River to southernmost Illinois and Indiana. Ancient bald cypress forests, with some trees more than 1,700 years old, once dominated swamps in the Southeast. The original range had been thought to only reach as far north as Delaware, but researchers have now found a natural forest on the Cape May Peninsula in southern New Jersey. The species can also be found growing outside its natural native range, in New York and Pennsylvania. The largest remaining old-growth stands are at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, near Naples, Florida, and in the Three Sisters tract along eastern North Carolina's Black River. The Corkscrew trees are around 500 years of age, and some exceed 40 m (130 ft) in height. In 1985, the Black River trees were cored by a dendrochronologist from the University of Arkansas, who found that some began growing as early as 364 AD. A subsequent visit to the area in 2019 revealed a tree dated by its tree-ring count to 605 BC, ranking as the ninth-oldest tree in the world.
In 2012, scuba divers discovered an underwater cypress forest several miles off the coast of Mobile, Alabama, in 60 feet of water. The forest contains trees that could not be dated with radiocarbon methods, indicating that they are more than 50,000 years old and thus most likely lived in the early glacial interval of the last ice age. The cypress forest is well preserved, and when samples are cut, they still smell like fresh cypress. A team, which has not yet published its results in a peer-reviewed journal, is studying the site. One possibility is that Hurricane Katrina exposed the grove of bald cypress, which had been protected under ocean floor sediments.
Reproduction and early growth
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