216 BALD CYPRESS 



and produces apparently as good lumber. The illustration 

 shows a tree standing on a dry knoll in the capitol grounds 

 at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The base of this knoll is rock, 

 and it is covered with alluvial gravel and sand, some twenty 

 feet, or thereabout, in thickness. The surface of the ground 

 where the tree stands is fully seventy-five feet above the 

 water in the Susquehanna River, about one third of a mile 

 distant. The tree is eighty-four feet high and twenty-nine 

 inches in diameter five feet above the ground. It is pro- 

 bably about seventy-five years of age. It cannot be much, 

 if any, above that age, as it was set out there some sixty- 

 five or seventy years ago. 



It will be observed that the natural tendency of the tree 

 is to grow straight and tall, even in the open, where it as- 

 sumes a conical form of crown with an acute apex ; but in 

 old age, and after it has attained its height growth, the 

 limbs spread out and form a round top with a broad base, 

 and it is then anything but the symmetrical cone shown in 

 the illustration. When growing in swamps, it has a broad 

 buttressed stem base, which is usually hollow, and its roots 

 throw up smooth conical projections, termed " knees," but 

 the extreme form or development of base largely disap- 

 pears, and the knees entirely so, when growing on dry 

 ground. What purpose these knees serve in the economy 

 of the tree, or what functions they perform, is entirely con- 

 jectural possibly to supply air to the roots. 



It sometimes grows to a height of one hundred and fifty 

 feet, with a diameter of five or six feet at the height where 

 the buttressed base vanishes. These are unusual dimen- 

 sions, however. We have no other valuable timber tree 

 which so greatly modifies its method and form of growth 

 by change of soil and location, or takes on a form in old 

 age so widely differing from that of its youth, as the Bald 

 Cypress. It is quite a rapid grower in early life, but gen- 

 erally slow in its old age, frequently not then increasing 

 in diameter more than two inches in thirty or forty years, 

 while in early life it may increase more than five times 



