Bald Cypresses at Trap Pond are Stately Shadows of Swamp that Was

Perched on the eastern rim of the Chesapeake’s watershed, closer to Atlantic beaches than to the Bay, Delaware’s Trap Pond State Park offers the standard recreational amenities, from ballfields and nature walks, to tenting, cabins and picnic tables shaded by tall pines.

But it’s Taxiodium distichum, the lordly bald cypress, that defines this nearly 4,000-acre park that guards the headwaters of the Delmarva Peninsula’s Nanticoke River. It is the nation’s northernmost natural occurrence of a species whose range extends south to Florida and west into Texas.

“It is a tree so different from any others that it evokes wonder and awe … even a few lend a certain solemnity to otherwise ordinary-looking woodland,” wrote the late Maryland author John Dennis in his book, “The Great Cypress Swamps.”

One of only a few species of deciduous conifer, the dense cypress stands here were turning to glossy cinnamon in the crisp autumn air, preparing to drop their needles — hence the name “bald.” The floor of the swamp is studded with cypress “knees,” unique protrusions from their root systems that reach a foot or two in height.

Come spring, they will feather out with a fresh, airy green that lights up the swamps where water-loving Taxodium predominates. It grows here even in standing water a few feet deep. It creates the effect of you literally floating through the cypress groves of the park’s ponds. Their smooth, columnar trunks intersperse with gnarly, sculptural old black gums, another native of Eastern swamps.

Kingfisher and wood duck calls echo through the water-woods, and we glided by a handsome beaver lodge. It’s easy to forget you’re only a few miles from tacky, busy U.S. Route 13 as it makes its way through lower Delaware.

Delmarva, so-called because it contains Delaware and portions of both Maryland and Virginia, has no natural lakes. Trap Pond’s 90 acres, mostly 8 feet deep or less, was created by damming a creek more than two centuries ago, much like dozens of other ponds that dot the region.

Its modest hydropower was first employed to saw timber as loggers took down the original forests, including most of the cypress. The region’s forests were also cut for charcoal to melt local deposits of bog iron into ingots.

As agriculture expanded in the 1800s, the ponds turned to powering grist mills. Nowadays, it is growing recreational demands that have made public use their new highest value.

Today, Trap Pond and adjoining ponds and stream trails managed by Delaware form one of the largest chunks of natural landscape left in southern Delaware, whose private lands are largely devoted to raising more chickens per acre than any other place in the nation, along with the vast fields of corn and soybeans it takes to feed them.

Article originally published in the Bay Journal on November 3, 2014.