CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) - Steve Tyson’s fascination with the bald cypress began not with a visit to the bayous of Louisiana or the low country of South Carolina, where the tree is known to thrive, but during a business trip to Germany back in 1982.
The Nitro resident, then a maintenance engineer for Union Carbide, found himself with some time to spend in a Bremen city park, where he admired a stand of what turned out to be bald cypress trees. “They were 36 inches in diameter and 85-90 feet tall, standing straight as gun barrels,” Tyson recalled.
A park superintendent told Tyson the trees came from cypress seedlings that had been imported from Virginia. Tyson figured if the trees grew that well in northern Germany, they’d probably do all right in West Virginia as well, and decided to give it a try.
Since 1990, Tyson has planted more than 2,000 cypress trees in West Virginia, most of them on a 23-acre hunting camp tract he owns in Wirt County. “Those trees I planted 24 years ago are now up to 45 feet tall,” he said.
Other cypress trees planted by Tyson include the two giants fronting his home, about 300 he planted on a tract of land he once owned in Roane County, a few dozen specimens planted in and around Nitro, including stands bordering a Nitro High parking lot and the town’s swimming pool. A friend at Blue Creek is growing another 100 or so, and a son in Teays Valley also has a stand of the stately trees.
“They call it eternal wood, because it’s resistant to rot and lasts practically forever,” Tyson said. It’s valuable as well as durable. During a trip to Louisiana, Tyson said he once spent $54 to buy a pair of 8-foot-long, 12-inch-wide bald cypress boards. “It’s higher than cherry or black walnut,” he said.
Cypress is used in building decks, docks, boats, greenhouse frames, kitchen drainboards and other items with which durability and water compatibility are concerns. “They’re used in all types of construction projects in the south,” Tyson said.
While cypress grow well on land, as Tyson has demonstrated, they grow better in stagnant water, where they are most often found in the wild, ranging from the Bayous of Texas and Louisiana to the Chesapeake Bay area. The northernmost natural stand of bald cypress is found in Trap Pond State Park near Laurel, Delaware. Some swamp-dwelling trees live to be more than 1,000 years old and have trunk diameters of 12 feet or more.
Although there is no record of bald cypress having ever been native to West Virginia, the tree has fared well in the state for more than a century as individual trees planted in private lawns and yards.
In his 2012 “History of Tree Planting in West Virginia,” WVU Forestry Professor Emeritus Kenneth Carvell recalls arriving in Morgantown in the early 1950s and encountering five large, old bald cypress trees flourishing in the downtown area. He later noticed individual trees of the same approximate age in Fairmont and Beckley.
Curious about how the trees ended up growing 200 miles north of their natural range, Carvell took increment borings of the trees which indicated that all of the bald cypress dated back to the early 1890s. After none of the property owners were able to tell Carvell the origins of their bald cypress trees, Carvell learned from library research that bald cypress seedlings were given out free to those visiting the Louisiana Pavilion at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and speculated the West Virginia fair-goers transplanted their souvenirs in their yards.
West Virginia’s oldest and largest bald cypress can be found in Weston, where the 106-foot tall tree towers over the front yard of a private home. This bald cypress apparently finds Weston to its liking, given its 19-foot girth and 160-year age. The giant Weston cypress is said to have grown from a seedling brought from Richmond and planted by the first owner of the property at about the same time his home was being built, circa 1853. The bald cypress and the American larch, or tamarack, are the only two North American cone-bearing trees to change color and shed their needles during fall and winter.
And shed they do, Tyson said. “In the spring, you can roll up the mat of needles like a carpet,” he said.
By demonstrating how well his cypress trees are faring in West Virginia, Tyson hopes to generate interest in using the species on reclamation projects, like surface mines, or closer to home, remediation work on former chemical plants.
“In Florida, they’re used in reclamation work for potash mines and do well there,” he said. “I think they’d be great to use on strip mines here instead of shrubby trees like autumn olive.” In addition to stabilizing soil, cypress plantings would provide a valuable timber crop, Tyson said, adding that the cost of cypress seedlings is less than many tree species typically used in reclamation. “You can get them from the Louisiana Department of Forestry for 25 cents apiece,” he said.
One of the main stumbling blocks Tyson has encountered when pitching the bald cypress to state foresters is the tree’s supposed inability to reproduce in West Virginia.
In October, seedlings produced by Tyson’s front yard cypress trees were dug up and examined by a Division of Forestry forester who verified that they were not root sprouts but the product of seed released naturally from cones growing on the Nitro trees.
In addition to planting thousands of bald cypress trees on his land, Tyson has planted American chestnuts from the Division of Forestry nursery in Mason County, butternut trees from seed collected in Mingo County, English walnut trees from seed collected in Wirt County, heartnut trees from seed collected in Kanawha County, and pecan trees from seed collected from a tree in Dunbar and from a roadside produce stand in Florida. He has also planted live oak, which failed to live up to their name following a West Virginia winter, and more successfully, pin oak, sawtooth oak, river oak, Norway spruce, Douglas fir, shellbark hickory and cedar.
“I graft apple trees as a hobby, too,” he said. “It’s been an interesting retirement.”
Tyson and his wife spend nearly as much time at their Wirt County hunting camp as they do at their Nitro home.
“It’s been an interesting retirement,” he said.
As to the disposition of his bald cypress plantation?
“I’ll leave that to my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to harvest,” he said.
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Information from: The Charleston Gazette, https://www.wvgazette.com
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