Taxodium (tak sodium)

[NL. (L. C. Richard, 1810), Taxodium distichum . 6203 closely crowded with spirally set scales. The fruit is a hard round cone, an inch long, with its very thick angular peltate stalked scales gaping apart at maturity, but persis tent after the fall of the seeds, which are large, shining, and coriaceous or corky on the surface. T. distichum, the bald or red cypre of the United States, is characteristic of southern swamps near the sea-coast, occupying large tracts to the exclusion of other trees, and extending often into deep water around lake-margins. It occurs from Delaware to Texas, and also in the Mi i ippi and Ohio valleys to Indiana and Illinois. It often reaches a great size, sometimes 150 feet in height and 36 in girth, and furnishes a valuable wood which is soft, close, easily worked or split, and very durable, and is much employed for cooperage, railway-ties, fences, posts, and shingles. It is almost indestructible in water or in contact with earth, but is often injured, especially beyond the Mi i ippi, by a fungus, a species of Dædale a. Two varieties are distinguished by lumbermen - the white cypre , with light brown wood, and the black cypre , with dark-brown harder and more durable wood, at first heavier than water; the sap-wood of both is nearly white. The tree is also the source of an e ential oil, a superior turpentine, and a medicinal resin, and from the beauty of its feathery foliage it is valued for lawn cultivation. It is especially remarkable for its habit, when growing under water, of throwing up large smooth conical projections known as cypre - knees, commonly 2 (sometimes 7) feet high, cov ered with reddish bark like the roots, and hollow, as is the base of the tree itself. They are by some supposed to be aërating organs, by others to serve as braces to afford a stable lateral support in the yielding bottom, and by others to be undeveloped or arrested tree-trunks. (Compare cypre -knee, knee, 3(d), and cypre l.) The tree itself often rises of as straight shaft 80 or 90 feet high before dividing into its flat spreading top, its base ribbed by large projecting buttre es, each continuous below with a strong and branching root, from horizontal branches of which the knees arise. The tree is also remarkable for its great longevity, growing rapidly at first, in cultivation sometimes adding an inch in diameter a year, but soon becoming as slow-growing as the yew, and adding only an inch in twelve to thirty years. The other species, T. mucronatum, the Mexican cypre , or ahuehete, forms extensive forests in the Sierra Madre, at elevations from 4,000 to 9,000 feet, itself often reaching 70 to 100 feet high, with longer and pendulous branchlets and more persistent greener leaves. It attains even a greater size and age than T. distichum; the celebrated cypre of Monte zum a, in the gardens of Chapultepec, variously estimated from 700 to 2,000 years old, is 41 to 45 feet in girth and about 120 feet high; one at Atlixco is about 76 feet, and another, near Oaxaca, 112 feet in girth; the latter was estimated by A. de Candolle and Asa Gray to be at least 4,000 years old. A third species, T. hetero phyllum (for which see water - pine, under pinel ), is now separated as Glyptostrobus heterophyllus, on account of its obovoid cone and stalked seeds. The genus is of great antiquity geologically, being found in the Cretaceous and in great abundance in the Tertiary of nearly all parts of the world. Taxoideæ (tak-soi'dē-ē), n. pl. [NL. (A. W. Eichler, 1887), prostrate shrub of Tasmania. For the others, see Podo carpus and Dacrydium. The tribe as now received coincides with the Podocarpeæ of previous authors with the addition of Dacrydium. 2. Eichler's second suborder of conifers, the same as the Taxaceæ, and including Eichler's tribes Taxoideæ and Taxex.