Mary Lou Bumeter, age 10, of East Peoria,

What are cypress knees?

You give a house plant just so much water and no more. The soil in the pot must be moist enough for the roots to soak up dissolved plant food, But if the soil is water‑logged, the plant perishes, For the roots need air along with the moisture. Trees and all land plants need air around their roots, And there is plenty of air in the crumbly soil and deep underground for the roots of the forest trees.

Nevertheless, the cypress tree grows ankle deep in the swamps. It is rooted deep in the water‑logged soil of stagnant swamps that contain little or no air at all, This handsome tree has its own way of getting air to its roots, it grows humps of wood that poke up above the water, We call them cypress knees. It is believed that the cypress breathes through its knees. Imagine

This beautiful tree is the bald cypress of a very ancient tree family. Its massive trunk may be 15 feet across, its feathery branches may reach 170 feet in the air. The tree may be 1,000 to 1,200 years old, Its pale green leaves are needles arranged around the twigs in graceful spirals. The purplish cones are about the size of robins eggs, Though a conifer, the bald cypress sheds its leaves every year. That.s how it got to be called bald, For several months it is as bald as an egg.

The bald cypress seems to prefer to have its roots in the swamp, though it can live on dry land, You can see it standing in the watery Everglades and in the swamps of the southeast. The fascinating knees grow only when the cypress is ankle deep in the water.

They grow singly or in clusters,  poking from the water a few feet from the tree trunk. The knees are bare, brown wood and are hollow inside, Some may grow to be six feet tall. They do not look as if they belong to the tree, But if you dig down you will find they are growing straight up from a root, When dried and polished, they take on a ginger colored sheen. Cypress knees are often used to make ornamental lamp bases.

The wood of the bald cypress has been called eternal It is lumber from trees at least 200 years old and it never seems to wear out. Being from a conifer tree, it has the tangy small of pines and termites avoid it. The weather has no effect on it, hot, cold, wet or dry. You would expect such a durable wood to be hard to work. Not at all. Cypress wood is easy to saw or carve.

The doors of Saint Peter's church in Rome are made of metal. Those they replaced were made of cypress, a close relative of our bald cypress. Those cypress doors had endured for 1,100 years without sign of wear. No wonder we like to use cypress wood for tough construction jobs, It is made into planks for ships that sail the Seven Seas. It makes railroad ties to take the trains across the continent. It even withstands some acids and is sometimes used to make vats for chemicals.