Plant: Bald Cypress Tree

Plant description

A native deciduous conifer of the southeastern floodplains, growing 50 to 70 feet tall and 20 to 30 feet wide in a broad pyramidal frame with horizontal, open branching and fine soft foliage. The small linear needles are held in two ranks, turn brown copper in fall and drop, leaving fibrous red brown to gray bark that peels in thin vertical strips. Round wrinkled cones about an inch across ripen from purplish green to brown. It takes full sun in acid clay, loam or sand that is moist and occasionally wet, and tolerates deer, salt, pollution, wind and standing water, making it a durable shade tree or specimen for a lawn, pond edge or rain garden.

Flowers

Male flowers appear in long drooping panicles while the female blooms appear at the ends of the branches.

Foliage

Small linear flat needles a quarter to three quarters of an inch long, held in two ranks.

Fruit

Round, wrinkled cones three quarters to one inch in diameter, purplish green maturing to brown.

Bark & stems

Fibrous, dark red brown to gray bark with many thin vertical exfoliating strips.

Native range

Eastern North America from Delaware to Florida, west to Texas and Mexico

Plant details