Cypress Trees

Cypress trees standing in the still water of Caddo Lake, on the Texas–Louisiana border — bald cypress, the signature tree of the southern swamp, draped in Spanish moss and rising straight out of the water on buttressed trunks. Caddo holds one of the largest flooded cypress forests in the world, and the trees here are old; some have been standing in this water for centuries.

Photographed on Caddo Lake in the summer of 1998. The cypress are what give Caddo its particular character — a forest growing in standing water, the trunks doubled in their own reflections, the whole place feeling older and stranger than an ordinary lake.