Last week's weather was glorious, and I long for it after a very hot weekend. The sky, with its puffy clouds served as the perfect backdrop for Glyptostrobus pensilis. This weird conifer has long been a favorite of mine. I like the sparseness of the canopy. It makes me think of dinosaurs for some reason, perhaps since it looks a bit like some of the renderings of tree-sized horsetails I have seen in books.
Like many conifers, it has two types of foliage. Stiff, upright whisk-like branchlets with small needles, and droopy branches with more open, flattened needles. References list this as deciduous, but in my experience, only the open, flattened needles are shed in the autumn, and the upright branches with clasping needles are retained and remain green. The cones are very round and interesting, too, and they are abundant enough to have some visual impact.
The bark is very spongy and light in weight. This seems odd to me, since usually such lightweight bark is found on conifers like Sequoiadendron giganteum that are engineered to survive fires with this fire-resistant bark insulating the cambium from heat. As implied by the name, water pine is found in swampy parts of Vietnam and southern China, and I can't imagine that fire is a common threat in those habitats. I've watched a rhizome invade the bark over time, and though it is not thriving, it continues to survive. This accession comes from Kowloon, and it reminds me that some plants from much warmer climates than ours have no problem with our winters. These trees have survived -10°F, and a quick check of the climate in Kowloon reveals that the temperature there seldom goes below freezing.
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