Cypress swamp

“ Before us lay an apparently interminable cypress swamp, behind us a sheet of water, formed by the junction of the two creeks, and at present overhung by a mass of smoke that concealed the horizon from our view. From time to time there was a burst of flame that lit up the swamp, and caused the cypress-trees to appear as if they grew out of a sea of fire.
"Come," said the old Yankee, "we must get on. It is near sunset, and we have far to go."
"And which way does our road lie?" I asked.
"Across the cypress swamp, unless you'd rather go round it."
"The shortest road is the best," said Carleton. ”

“ About ten miles from Kissimmee, is a cypress swamp—it is an aquatic jungle full of fallen trees, brush, vines and tangled undergrowth, all darkened by the dense shadows of the tall cypress trees, and full of moccasins and alligators. Running through the swamp is a chain of islands. Here is a field for sportsmen, and here live unmolested a whole colony of the bruin family. Hunters hear their growls, and numerous fresh tracks show where the night marauders have entered the hommock, where they feast on wild honey, huckleberries, the cabbage of the palmetto and the wild orange. ”

“ The wet ponies and kine turned away from the north and stood in the slanting storm with bowed heads. The great wall of cypress swamp grew spectral. But its depths, the marshes far beyond sight behind them, and the little, hidden, rushy lakes, were alive with game. No snake crossed the path. Under the roof, on the galérie, the wheel hummed, the loom pounded; inside, the logs crackled and blazed on the hearth; on the board were venison, mallard, teal, rice-birds, sirop de baterie, and quitte; round the fireside were pipes, pecans, old stories, and the Saturday-night contra-dance ”

“ We drove through miles of cotton and corn, rank with the luxuriant growth of a soil marvelous for its fertility. Then came a bad road along a broken levee, through a cypress swamp, where amid the gloom of trailing moss, hanging down almost to the edge of the stagnant, scum-covered water, one could dimly make out the great cypress-knees, and fancy them fit resting-places for the snakes and alligators which are said to constitute the only inhabitants. ”

“ This is in the very heart and centre of the cypress swamp, as also in the heart and hollow of a cypress tree. No dead log, but a living growing trunk, which stands on a little eyot, not immediately surrounded by water, but marsh and mud. There is water beyond, on every side, extending more than a mile, with trees standing in and shadowing its stagnant surface.
On the little islet Nature has provided a home for the hunted fugitive—an asylum where he is safe from pursuit—beyond the scent of savage hounds, and the trailing of men almost as savage as they ”

“ We were again passing through a cypress swamp, which extended on both sides of the river. Knotted and twisted trunks projected far into the stream; the tall stems of trees rose high above our heads; while here and there the rays of the sun, penetrating a short way into the forest, and falling on the lower parts of the trunks, the huge roots, and the enormous creepers suspended from the boughs, served to render the rest of the forest more dark and gloomy. Now and then a vulture croaked at us as we passed; and we could see huge snakes twisting and wriggling among the trunks in search of prey. ”

“ Viewing these things, less obtrusive but equally beautiful, one is inclined to forget his regret for the vanished jasmine yellow and the pure white of the passing cherokee roses. Behind it all, looming toward the high sky line of the swamp in such places is the feathery softness of the new cypress leaves, delicately fluffed in the softest tints of pure spring green. Young cypress leaves are more like feathers than any other leaves I know. Collectively it seems as if they had as much right to be called plumage as foliage. ”

“ No other tree darkens in evening silhouette so impressively as the two queen trees of the Dismal Swamp, the juniper and cypress. With the low sun behind them, the clear-cut delicacy of their foliage reminds one of the exquisite fineness of dried sea mosses on a tinted page. But when the sun has gone down, and the sky is still flushed with its glory, the cypress takes on a mystery of dark and refined beauty that is all its own. It rises still blacker than the dark underwood, the tallest among the trees, lonely, like a plume. ”

“ Elevated only a few feet above sea-level, threatened with frequent inundation, and in its primitive estate a cypress swamp, it seemed little suited for the abode of men, yet time has confirmed the wisdom of the choice. ”

“ The cypress swamps are pretty well protected from fire most of the time by the wetness of the soil or the absence of inflammable material on the ground, but occasionally in a very dry season fire gets into the edge of such a swamp from the neighboring uplands and kills some of the trees, whose thin bark renders them rather sensitive. ”

“ At the bottom of all these 'cypress swamps' a bed of clay is found, with roots of the tall cypress, just as the underclays of the coal are filled with stigmaria." [69] In this way a thick accumulation of vegetable matter goes on forming for years, until either the river changes its course, and inundating the swamp gradually covers it over with sand and mud, or until, owing to oscillations of the earth's crust, the district is either permanently submerged, so as to be silted over, or elevated to nourish a new and different kind of vegetation. ”

“ Dismal by nature, indeed, as well as by name, is that vast swamp, of which we now skirted the northern edge, looking into its endless pools of black water, where the melancholy cypress and juniper-trees alone overshadowed the thick-looking surface, their roots all globular, like huge bulbous plants, and their dark branches woven together with a hideous matting of giant creepers, which clung round their stems, and hung about the dreary forest like a drapery of withered snakes. ”

“ South of the Caloosa-hatchie river, between the Everglades and the Gulf, extends the Big Cypress. This is a large swamp, fifty miles long and thirty-five miles broad. Here the saw-grass gives way to groves of cypress trees, with a rank and tangled undergrowth of vines. The soil is either bog or quicksand, generally covered one or two feet deep with stagnant water. The sun’s rays rarely penetrate the dense foliage, and on the surface of the water floats a green slime, which, when disturbed, emits a sickening odor of decay. ”

“ Most of the baldcypresses (which are not true cypresses) are small trees, growing in open to dense stands throughout the area. The swamp is watered by about 50 inches of annual rainfall, the runoff from which flows as a sheet and in sloughs south and west to meet the coastal strip of mangroves and low sand dunes.
Big Cypress is speckled with low limestone outcrops, cut with shallow sloughs 1 to 2 feet deep, and dotted with ponds and wet prairies. As in the everglades, fire and water maintain the character of the plantlife in this swampy realm of sunlight and shadow. ”

“ Maynard of one dollar for every parrot's egg delivered to him, induced a Florida cracker to cut a path into a dense cypress swamp at Dunn's Lake, about the middle of the month of June. The hunter was occupied three days in the enterprise, and returned much disgusted with the job. He had found the nests of the parakeets in the hollow cypress-trees of the swamp, but he was too late to secure the eggs, as they were hatched, and the nests filled with young birds. The number of young in each nest seemed to leave no doubt of the fact of several adults nesting in one hole. ”

“ Halfway toward the cypress trees the dugout grounded hopelessly, and they left it and waded through six inches of water the remainder of the distance.
"They're honest about their marks at least," said Payne when they had reached the trees. "But they didn't say anything about the cypress being in an unholy swamp."
"Holy smoked fish, what a country!" muttered Higgins as he peered into the dark recesses of the densely wooded swamp. "What a place to hide out in if a fellow wanted to drop out of the world. Say, I guess this is the same swamp our friend Davis went paddling into yesterday. ”

“ Wide tracts of cypress swamp separate the everglades from the Gulf of Mexico, while in Southern Florida they approach within a few miles of the Atlantic Coast, being separated by an intervening dyke of coral, crossed by frequent streams of rapid current, for the everglades are far from being stagnant swamps. ”

“ The fact that the deciduous cypress grows without difficulty on the moister class of lowlands in California, 12 or 15 feet above bottom water, is of interest in this connection. It then assumes the upland form shown in the figure above, although not growing quite as tall. The calcareous nature of these soils is probably an important factor in this apparently incongruous adaptation of a subtropical swamp tree to arid conditions. In its swamp form the cypress usually grows in rather shallow, heavy clay soil, into the dense subsoil of which the roots penetrate but little. ”

“ There are many things unspeakably stimulating about a journey in such a tropical swamp. You work your way through thick, tangled growths of water plants and hanging vines. You clamber over huge fallen logs damp with rank vegetation, and wade through a maze of cypress "knees." Unwittingly, you are sure to gather on your clothing a colony of ravenous ticks from some swaying branch. Redbugs bent on mischief scramble up on you by the score and bury themselves in your skin, while a cloud of mosquitoes waves behind you like a veil. ”

“ The pitcher-plants (Sarracenia minor and S. psittacina) grow two or three times as large in Okefinokee as they do anywhere else. The leaves of S. minor, which had never been known to grow more than a foot tall in the pine-barrens, often attain a height of over three feet in the swamp. The ground in these bogs is everywhere covered with a dense soft carpet of sphagnum.
Where the swamp muck has reached a depth of three or four feet the pines can no longer exist, and the cypress grows much more densely than it does in the bogs, constituting the bulk of the vegetation. ”

“ They point clearly to the successive growth of forests in the extensive swamps of the plain, where the ground was slowly raised, year after year, by the mud thrown down during inundations. These roots and stools belong chiefly to the deciduous cypress (Taxodium distichum) , and other swamp-trees, and they bear testimony to the constant shifting of the course of the great river, which is always excavating land originally formed at some distance from its banks. ”

“ It is found among the thick cypress swamps of the south even in the middle of winter. It can see well in the dark, sometimes searching food in caves, where to most other day birds objects would be undistinguishable. ”

“ The White and Black Spruce are varieties of this genus.
Cypresses.—The Cypress is a very interesting tree, from its extraordinary dimensions, and the varied application of its wood. Its northern boundary is Indian river, in Delaware, in latitude about thirty-nine degrees. In proceeding southward, it becomes more abundant in the swamps, and in Louisiana those parts of the marshes where the cypress grows almost alone are called cypress swamps, and they sometimes occupy thousands of acres. ”

“ A sudden draining of the swamp would be disastrous in several ways. In the first place, it would kill the fish and other aquatic animals, and would probably be detrimental to the health of the surrounding country in other ways. Then it would put an end to the production of cypress timber, for which the swamp seems to be best adapted. Worst of all, fire would soon get in from the surrounding pine forests (which are burned over more or less every year) , and consume the muck, timber and all. ”

“ With conservative methods of exploitation the supply should be practically perpetual. Next to the cypress the most important timber is the pine on the islands, but there is still so much of the same outside of the swamp that this comparatively inaccessible supply has not yet been drawn upon for lumber or turpentine. For the various hardwood species which inhabit the swamp there has been as yet almost no demand, and even in the easily accessible small swamps in the surrounding pine-barrens they have scarcely been touched. ”

“ These treat, for the most part, of the vegetable and animal life to be found along the line of the survey, particularly in the swamp of the Mississippi river.
He makes several interesting observations on the red and the white cypress, the former of which he says is the more valuable for strength and durability, owing to its being impregnated with resin. He also observes that the "cypress knees," as they are commonly called, never reach a height greater than the high water mark. ”

“ When first taken from the swamp the long-immersed logs are very much heavier than water, but they dry with great rapidity. A cypress log from the Mississippi Delta, which two men could barely handle at the time it was taken out some years ago, has dried out so much since then that to-day one man can lift it with ease. White cedar telegraph poles are said to remain floating in the water of the Great Lakes sometimes for several years before they are set in lines and to last better than freshly cut poles. ”