Pin Drop: Cat Island Bald Cypress

Wrestling with the "gnarl factor"

With its odd and sometimes grotesque knees, with its omnipresent haze of Spanish moss, the bald cypress—Taxodium distichum—rivals the live oak as perhaps the prime botanical symbol of the South. It’s a survivor, hearty and water-growing, fiercely holding its grip in soft soils even after hurricane winds, a good fit for this soggy and storm-battered region.

Its wood is a survivor, too, naturally rot- and pest-resistant. That helped give the cypress, or at least its surrounding ecosystem, a countervailing distinction. As National Geographic recently pointed out, swamps are perhaps the only landscape that has been “specifically targeted for destruction by the federal government.” Beginning in 1849, the government transferred much of the nation’s swampland to the states. They were to be sold, the proceeds used to build flood-control infrastructure—a move meant to supercharge the country’s agricultural economy by opening up new lands for planting.