Baldcypress

Appearance

"Taxodium distichum" is a large, slow-growing, and long-lived tree. It typically grows to heights of 35–120 feet and has a trunk diameter of 3–6 feet.

The main trunk is often surrounded by cypress knees. The bark is grayish brown to reddish brown, thin, and fibrous with a stringy texture; it has a vertically, interwoven pattern of shallow ridges and narrow furrows.

The needle-like leaves are 1⁄2 to 3⁄4 inch long and are simple, alternate, green, and linear, with entire margins. In autumn, the leaves turn yellow or copper red. The bald cypress drops its needles each winter and then grows a new set in spring.

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 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 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 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. This species 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, medium, and heavy 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 tall, and the stoutest known, in the Real County near Leakey, Texas, has a circumference of 475 in. 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 Nation Wildlife Refuge, near St. Francisville, Louisiana, and it is 96 feet tall, 56 feet 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 near Sanford, Florida, was 165 feet tall before the hurricane of 1925, when it lost about 40 feet in height. It had a circumference of 47 feet and a diameter of 17.5 feet and was estimated to be 3,500 years old. It was burned down accidentally in 2012 by a person who was addicted to drugs.

"Big Dan" is one of the oldest living specimens and is found near High Springs, Florida at Camp Kulaqua. It is estimated to be 2,704 years old as of 2020. It is growing in the Hornsby Spring swamp run and is more than 35 feet in circumference.

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. 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 in height. In 1985, the Black River trees were cored by dendrochronologist David Stahle from the University of Arkansas. He found that some began growing as early as 364 AD. Returning to the area in 2019, Stahle discovered a tree dated by its tree-ring count to 605 B. C., ranking as the ninth-oldest tree in the world.

Habitat

This species is native to humid climates where annual precipitation ranges from about 760 mm or 30 inches in Central Texas to 1,630 mm or 64 inches along the Gulf Coast. Although it grows best in warm climates, the natural northern limit of the species is not due to a lack of cold tolerance, but to specific reproductive requirements: further north, regeneration is prevented by ice damage to seedlings. Larger trees are able to tolerate much lower temperatures and lower humidity.

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

The bald cypress is monoecious. Male and female strobili mature in one growing season from buds formed the previous year. The male catkins are about 2 mm in diameter and are borne in slender, purplish, drooping clusters 7 to 13 cm long that are conspicuous during the winter on this deciduous conifer. Pollen is shed in March and April. Female conelets are found singly or in clusters of two or three. The globose cones turn from green to brownish-purple as they mature from October to December. The cones are 13 to 36 mm in diameter and consist of 9 to 15 four-sided scales that break away irregularly after maturity. Each scale can bear two irregular, triangular seeds with thick, horny, warty coats and projecting flanges. The number of seeds per cone averages 16 and ranges from 2 to 34. Cleaned seeds number from about 5,600 to 18,430 per kg.Bald cypress is one of the few conifer species that sprouts. Thrifty sprouts are generally produced from stumps of young trees, but trees up to 60 years old also send up healthy sprouts if the trees are cut during the fall or winter. However, survival of these sprouts is often poor, and those that live are usually poorly shaped and do not make quality saw timber trees. Stumps of trees up to 200 years old may also sprout, but the sprouts are not as vigorous and are more subject to wind damage as the stump decays. In the only report on the rooting of bald cypress cuttings found in the literature, cuttings from trees five years old rooted better than those from older trees.