Taxodium distichum bald cypress

Bald cypress preserved during construction, Dolores Street. Sairus Patel, 10 Jan 2023

Related to the redwood, but deciduous, the bald cypress puts on a new coat of light green feathery leaves in spring. By autumn it produces cones resembling those of a redwood, except that they fall apart as they release their seeds. When the leaves fall they fall in complete sprays. The wood is soft and light and resistant to termites and dampness, as is redwood, and it is definitely not a cypress. Bald cypress is famous for its ability to live in swamps, which it does by raising pneumatophores from its roots to form “knees,” presumably to breathe. For stability, it also develops buttresses.

Two soaring specimens were discovered on campus only in 2023: one inside the fence on the northern corner of Dolores Street and Cabrillo Avenue, another in front of the house at 1060 Campus Drive. One on the east side of the Angel of Grief (northeast of the Mausoleum) had been designated as a significant specimen but was removed sometime around the 1990s. One grows as a street tree on the right edge of 135 East O’Keefe Street in Menlo Park. Find another at the edge of the parking lot at the Menlo Park Library (800 Alma Street), near the Norfolk Island pine. Knees have not been seen around any of these bald cypresses. The University of California at Berkeley has specimens, several of which are along Strawberry Creek, southwest of the Eucalyptus Grove.

Bald cypress, Campus Drive. Sairus Patel, 29 Mar 2023

Name derivation: Taxodium – Greek word taxus (yew) and eidos (resembling), referring to the similar leaf shapes; distichum – two-ranked (the needles).