Now that's what you call a swamp

VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Thu 24 Nov 2011 02:29
The city of Virginia Beach is a large and undistinguished coastal sprawl at the entrance to the Chesapeake and adjacent to Norfolk. Its main claim to fame is as the first landing place of the Virginia colonists, England's first permanent colony in the New World. The colonists only stayed a few days in Spring 1607 before moving on up the James River to found Jamestown (named after the then King) but the site is commemorated by First Landing State Park, a large tract of preserved natural countryside. It is renowned as one of the best and most northerly stands of the Bald Cypress Taxodium distichum. Here it is growing in a 'fossilised' dune slack:
 
 
(A 'fossil' sand dune is an old dune that has become vegetated, and therefore stable. Its form is preserved, and the hollows between the dunes become 'slacks' which are at least seasonally wet).
Bald or Swamp Cypress is a long-lived tree (the oldest known is aged 1620) and is at the northern end of its range in Virginia (the seedlings cannot survive severe frost). Here is another view:
 
 
The Bald Cypress is so called because despite being a conifer it is deciduous. The large spikes sticking out of the swamp are typical of the species. They are not dead stumps, but live woody tissue. Surprisingly their function is uncertain; once thought to be a means of gathering oxygen above the anaerobic swamp waters, like mangroves (now disproved by cutting them off experimentally, without adverse effect), they are now postulated to be a form of butress to stop the trees being blown over in a hurricane. Whatever, they are wonderfully evocative of a spooky swamp, made the more so by the grey festoons of Spanish Moss Tillandria usneoides which you can just see adorning the trees in the picture above. Here is a clearer view of it, with Alison:
 
 
 
Tillandria is not a moss, despite its English name. It is in fact a flowering plant, a Bromeliad although its flowers are tiny and inconspicuous. It is an epiphyte - it it gains support from a host tree (but is not parasitic upon it like ivy), has no roots and derives its nutrients by absorbing them directly from the air and rainfall. It seems to like the Bald Cypress in particular because of its high rate of foliar mineral leaching ie. the cypress exudes nutrients which wash onto the moss when it rains.