Ken, If you think Bald cypress is that vigorous grower, 'Nanjing Beauty' blows them out easily. 159% more growth than average BC growth... The farthest north that I'm aware where it is grown for evaluation is at St. Louis Botanical Garden that survived the April 7 2007 hard freeze while many bald cypress trees suffered a lot of damages. Supposedly very easy to root... At this point, it is not exactly known of which species it came from. China people claimed it was T. mucronatum x T. ditischum hybrid but preliminary genetic testings showed much closer to pond cypress.. More testing is going to be done to confirm that in the future but it has recieved a lot of postive reviews everywhere. Oh and T. mucronatum typically grows to be the twice the size of typical bald cypress after 10 years... I just find it funny to hear that bald cypress has "VERY vigorous growth rates".

Lou and scotjute: Thanks--I have been a close observer of baldcypress for a long time, and it is one of my favorite trees, but I still have some things to learn. I have seen this kind of thing on my trees before, but not nearly as bad as this. My watering stopped then foliage loss, and I feel confident, expecially after what you have said, that the worst one will be OK. One other looked moderately bad, and a third did not show that much loss. One of my observations when I lived in D.C. was a trio of baldcypress planted in front of the Natural History Museum. These were nice, but not especially large, older trees. At one point, someone decided that the Mall area should have rows of elms exclusively. They removed some trees and replaced them with elms. At about that time they put down around these baldcypress trees some kind of fine sand/clay mixture as a kind of "pavement." I guess water could, to some extent, penetrate this, but it seemed to me to be an attempt to kill these trees so the could keep the geometry of the rows of elms more pure. I think they were afraid that if they just cut down the trees as they had some others, they would get too many complaints. Anyway, the trees suffered for a time, and one had about 15 feet of its top die back. But...hah!..they all survived. I was impressed with their toughness. --Spruce

Beng, Initially, I thought it may be Taxodium mucronatum. I asked around. A few thought it looked like T. mucronatum. A director of university arboretum liked its form and asked for cones. He noted that the size of seeds fall in between mucronatum and distichum. The key difference between these two species is that mucronatum stays green about a month longer (starts growth early and can retain green foliage significantly longer into late fall/early winter. Even most of winter if it is mild enough. However, this one is drops its foliage at the same time as other bald cypress trees so who knows? I wish I could find out where it came from. I haven't seen any bald cypress like that.

i see, i have seen many people planting it as a hill land resort decoration tree in Taiwan. But so far i did not seen a unit here in Malaysia yet. But once i am flying over to Taiwan, I will get some seeding there. But i understand in Maryland the weather is so much cooling as compare to Malaysia indeed. However I have successfully grow up some cypress macrocarpa from seeding. but only limited of them can only survive.