What Southwest Florida tree is related to the giant redwoods and sequoias of California, looks dead this time of year and is great company at funerals and beer parties? You guessed it, the bald cypress, also known as Taxodium districhum.
Cypress trees are scattered all over Lee County, wherever you find consistently swampy soil. The deciduous conifers look dead because their feathery needles are dropped during a normal winter dry season. Thus, they become temporarily "bald," (whereas such a condition is usually permanent in we male humans). When the summer rains kick in, the trees refoliate in light green fashion.
The wood is slow to rot, so it was ideal for PT boat hulls during World War II, and for houses, funeral caskets and boat docks during the building explosion of the 1940s. As a tasteless and odorless wood, it was once ideal for beer barrels. Today, it's a protected tree. Not only does it help provide shade and retain moisture in the swamp when it's most needed, but it offers a wonderful habitat for all kinds of birds and other wildlife.
Young cypresses are broadly conical, while the old timers are flat-topped at maturity. Some cypress, such as those in Corkscrew Swamp near Naples or the Fakahatchee Strand in the Everglades, may have been over a hundred years old when Columbus arrived in the New World. They can reach a height of 70 feet or more. If hurricane winds should snap off their crown, the tree simply grows a new one.
Because much of Southwest Florida's crust is made up of a hard limestone rock with just a few feet of muck above it, cypress trees tend to have a shallow root system. Their roots may be covered by water for more than six months out of the year, making it difficult for the tree to breathe. Many researchers believe that cypress knees--the little nodules of wood poking up around the base of some trees--are "air-breathing" extensions of the roots.
In the Everglades, there are two other kinds of cypress, the pond and dwarf. The pond cypress grows to about 20 feet, while the dwarf (also known as the hat rack) cypress may peak out at six feet, even though it might be 200 years old.
Cypress thrives along the east coast from Florida to Delaware, west to Texas and north in the Mississippi Valley to southern Illinois. Few trees look more stately and sturdy, their short limbs cloaked in Spanish moss and supporting beautiful orchids and bromeliads that from a distance resemble large bird nests.
Hollywood often portrays cypress swamps as stagnate, smelly waste lands, too muggy and mosquito-infested for humans to enjoy. But the water flows, sweet aromas are plentiful, the temperature is cooler than outside the swamp, and mosquitoes are tolerable much of the year--thanks to a gambusia fish that thrives on mosquito larvae.
So go find a cypress to hug and tell it I sent you. Just don't trip over the knees.
Better still, take one of our Everglades tours.