The Bald Cypress — Louisiana's State Tree

Before industrial logging took it all, the cypress forests of southern Louisiana were described in 1908 as "of such extent as to be almost boundless, the trees of such size as to be almost beyond belief." By 1925, virtually all of Louisiana's virgin bald cypress had been logged. What remains — in the Atchafalaya Basin, at Cat Island, at Lake Verret — are scattered survivors, some over a thousand years old. They were spared because they were hollow, too remote, or simply overlooked. The bald cypress became Louisiana's state tree in 1963. Every swamp tour in Acadiana passes through what's left of the forest that once covered everything. You're looking at fragments of what was here, and at the fact that anything survived at all.