The Neuenheimer Landstrasse Swamp Cypress

A tree from the swamps of the American southeast has been protected on a Heidelberg riverside road since 28 July 1942. The register calls it Sumpfzypresse Neuenheimer Landstrasse and gives nothing else: no age, no girth, no description. The designation itself is the whole record, and it is a long one, because eighty-four years of protection on a public road is not nothing. Bald cypress is the conifer that behaves like a broadleaf. It grows in standing water in Louisiana and the Carolinas, throws up woody knees from its roots when the ground is wet, and drops every needle each winter after turning a deep rust orange. A specimen doing that on the north bank of the Neckar, in a line of ordinary street trees, is a peculiar and rather good thing to come across. Two honest notes. The register does not print a binomial, so the species here is the reading that German registers almost always mean by Sumpfzypresse; if you can tell a true bald cypress from a pond cypress on the ground, we would like your verdict. And our pin is the register's own coordinate rather than a fix taken at the trunk, so it puts you on the right stretch of the Neuenheimer Landstrasse rather than at the tree. Do not confuse it with the swamp cypresses at the Tertiärgärtchen in the Neuenheimer Feld. Different site, several hundred metres away.