The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Taxodium
Also called Bald cypress, Cypress, Baldcypresses
Taxodium is a small genus of large, deciduous to semi-evergreen conifers from the southern United States and Mexico, best known as the bald cypress. Commonly grown members are trees that thrive in full sun and are happiest with consistently moist or even wet soil.
Taxodium is a genus of one to three species (depending on taxonomic opinion) of extremely flood-tolerant conifers in the cypress family, Cupressaceae. The name is derived from the Latin word taxus 'yew' and the Greek word εἶδος (eidos) 'similar to'. Within the family, Taxodium is most closely related to Chinese swamp cypress (Glyptostrobus pensilis) and sugi (Cryptomeria japonica).
Species of Taxodium occur in the southern part of the North American continent and are deciduous in the north and semi-evergreen to evergreen in the south. They are large trees, reaching 100–150 ft (30–46 m) tall and 6.5–10 ft (2–3 m) (exceptionally 36 ft or 11 m) trunk diameter. The needle-like leaves, 0.2–0.8 in (0.5–2 cm) long, are borne spirally on the shoots, twisted at the base so as to appear in two flat rows on either side of the shoot.
The trees are especially prized for their wood, of which the heartwood is extremely rot- and termite-resistant. The heartwood contains a sesquiterpene called cypressene, which acts as a natural preservative. It takes decades for cypressene to accumulate in the wood, so lumber taken from old-growth trees is more rot resistant than that from second-growth trees. However, age also increases susceptibility to Pecky Rot fungus (Stereum taxodii), which attacks the heartwood and causes some damaged trees to become hollow and thus useless for timber. Bald Cypress wood was much used in former days in the southeastern United States for roof shingles. The shredded bark of these trees is used as a mulch.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Taxodium by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
