Now that's what you call a swamp
VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Thu 24 Nov 2011 02:29
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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.
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