Taxodium distichum

This month I salute one of my favourite trees in the garden at Saling on its 50th birthday. Taxodium is called the Swamp Cypress because its home is the swamps of South Carolina and the Florida Everglades, and Bald Cypress because it is bare-headed in winter. It is not a cypress at all, in fact, but a member of the family that includes the redwoods and the Japanese Cryptomeria japonica I wrote about two months ago.

It was planted in the water garden at Saling in 1959, surrounded by maples, pines, larches, parrotias, a ginkgo, a liquidambar and several metasequoias. I know because I found the nursery bills for them all in the potting shed in 1972. In 50 years it has reached a very respectable 23 metres by 1.9 in girth (or 76 feet by 6' 6") and produced a dozen of the odd ‘knees,’ or woody protruberances from the roots, that only Taxodiums grow. They stick up from the ground, some nearly a foot high, within a circumference of 20 feet from the trunk, if necessary breaking up a path (though not yet, happily, the concrete bottom of the pond). Do they ‘breathe’ through their thin orange bark, and if so why?

In many superficial ways Taxodium resembles Metasequoia, the ‘Dawn Redwood’ discovered in China in the 1940s. In being a deciduous conifer for one; in having a ramrod trunk and small thin branches, too. Metasequoia has a reputation for remarkable speed of growth, so it is interesting to see that in this case Taxodium, in marginally damper soil, has easily outstripped it. All the trees in the picture are 1959 contemporaries. The straight stem on the right is a metasequoia.

The swamp cypress is attractive from spring through summer with its soft light green leaves in feathery masses. November, though, is its best month, as the leaves turn red-brown, hanging on into December.

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