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Taxodium distichum

Re-re-revisited

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Bald Cypress has to be one of the most beautiful and fascinating trees in Florida, in many ways.  Thanks to sprawl, drainage, harvesting, hurricanes, and who knows what, you don’t see many large examples in eastern Palm Beach County. But there are a few, and a surprising little “micro-forest” is hidden in the bosom of Jupiter along Jones Creek just west of Jupiter High School.  

The Bald Cypresses are the gray-colored treetops to the right of the swimming pool. A postage stamp urban habitat remnant. The darker area between the cypress and the orange rooftops is mangrove swamp.

The swampy nature of the habitat may be why the magnificent bald cypress and their associates are still there.    The associates include pileated woodpeckers today, and two barred owls on the previous visit.   Also notable, although all hard to find:  Golden-Clubs (Orontium) and Jack in the Pulpit (Arisaema)

OK, how old are the Bald Cypress?  Tough to figure, too many variables, and no way to measure precisely noninvasively.   

The “cable” on the trunk is Coinvine (Dalbergia).

Disclaimer: my estimate is rough. UF biologists Katherine Ewel and William Mitsch estimated wild Bald Cypress diameter (not radius) to increase 1-3.3 mm per year.  Let’s go arbitrarily with 2.5 mm per year. 

Bald Cypress growth rings, by John St. John. Although tree rings generally represent years, that is not strictly so in Bald Cypress where water levels influence ring formation.

Today I measured the diameter of one jumbo trunk at 1200 mm, about 5 feet above the dilated base.     That gives approximately 500 years, give or take a wide margin of error, but you get the idea. What was going on in the year 1524?   By coincidence, I happen to know an answer.  Last week I visited the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City and learned about Aztecs in the 1500s.   The BC trees in Jupiter were young at the time of the nasty Aztec Conquest.   Boggles my mind to know that today’s diehard urban Cypresses predate DeSoto and the Fountain of Youth. Seems that immortal Bald Cypress does not need a Fountain of Youth.  The site then probably looked much as it looks now, just a whole lot bigger.  Hope it is still there in 500 more years.

Aren’t the knees supposed to sit down in the mud and water? Knee-ish things sprout on massive horizontal branches. Rats—at first,from a distance I thought that might be an owl.

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*There is a trail, and a short boardwalk connecting the parking lot just N of the Aquatic Center with the Cypress, but  you may not want to go there.  The site is tiny, and like most urban woods, there are human-related occurrences ranging from “unaesthetic,” to questionable people in the shadows. Don’t go there alone, and be aware that the entire visit will take under 20 minutes.