Culture
JUNE 2022 48
LOUISIANA'S CHAMPION
LANDSCAPING
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TREES
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THE SECRET TO
PLAYING
F R I S B E E W I T H G O D // 5 3
B A C KY A R D B E A U T I E S THE
ART OF NATIVE
"BIRDING-BY-COMPARISON"
CHAMPIONSHIPS
If These Trees Could Talk
CAT ISLAND'S NATIONAL CHAMPION BALD CYPRESS CONTINUES ITS REIGN OVER A CHANGING LANDSCAPE, AND A NEW NATIONAL CHAMPION LIVE OAK RECLAIMS ITS TITLE IN ST. TAMMANY Story by Alexandra Kennon • Photos by C.C. Lockwood
I
was around nine years old when I first laid eyes on the National Champion bald cypress tree nestled deep in the forests of my home parish of West Feliciana. My father had instilled his own profound love for nature in his only daughter, thus our pilgrimage to the tree did not come without some hype. “It’s the largest tree east of the Mississippi River,” he emphasized for the umpteenth time as his ’89 Volkswagen camper van rumbled down the dirt road into Cat Island National Wildlife Refuge. “It’s over a thousand years old.” Having not quite breeched a decade myself, my grasp on size and time even more abstract than now, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But walking around the wide, gnarled base of the impossibly-immense tree, running my child-sized hand over centuries’ worth of graffiti carved into its trunk, I gained a small semblance of understanding. I truly felt my smallness for the first time. I looked up toward the canopy, the crown obstructed by the sunbeams streaming through the foliage. Even as a child, I perceived a deep wisdom emitting from that tree—a wisdom only granted by time, by a thousand years spent as a silent observer of the ever-changing world.
called of his and Hunt’s discovery. “I mean, it’s just so much bigger than everything else.” Surely enough, they had discovered the new National Champion bald cypress, which has continued its reign ever since, unrivaled as the largest bald cypress tree in the United States.
memorating his and Hunt’s discovery of the Champion Tree on the wall in his office. “I’ve got a box that is three feet deep of all the memorabilia from this tree over the years, from all over the United States,” Clapp told me over the phone, recalling how Louisiana Lottery used
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A Refuge is Formed
In October, 2000, Cat Island National Wildlife Refuge was formed by an act of Congress, which designated 36,500 acres for the refuge as the land could be purchased from existing landowners. Georgia-Pacific sold the federal government the initial ten thousand acres, with the Nature Conservancy of Louisiana acting as a holding company. Now, according to President of the Friends of Cat Island William Daniel, the refuge has expanded to 13,000 acres. “So, it’s growing over time. The federal government is an eternal entity—we will both be gone, and our grandkids will be gone, and they’ll still be thriving and acquiring land as long as it’s a willing seller.” Daniel also noted that unlike in most land sales in Louisiana, private land owners who sell property to the government to become part of the refuge can maintain their mineral rights in perpetuity—meaning they can not only keep them, but pass them on to heirs. “And the Champion Tree caused a big push to form this refuge. You know, it was a main factor in it,” Daniel explained of the formation of Cat Island, which was also founded to preserve a habitat for migratory birds and native animals. “It’s the largest hardwood bottomland forest along the lower Mississippi that’s unprotected by levees, which means it still floods on an annual cycle.”
Discovering a Champion
In the early 1980s, when the Cat Island National Wildlife Refuge property was still owned by Georgia-Pacific paper company, Georgia-Pacific foresters Desmond Clapp and Jeff Hunt came upon a jaw-droppingly large bald cypress tree. It turned out that tree broke the national record for largest bald cypress in the country at the time, and so it became the new National Champion. “Well, about a month later, we found another one even bigger than that, and turned it in,” Clapp said, recalling the wonder of discovering so many huge, ancient cypress trees in one area. But he and Hunt had not even found the true behemoth, yet. “Then we were working down there and found this one, which dwarfed all the rest of ‘em,” Clapp re-
And I did not scratch them off, because I really wanted, you know, the original untouched thing. So, I may have had a winner, but I’ll go to my grave never knowin’ that.”
Onward, the Flood Photo of the National Champion Bald Cypress at Cat Island National Wildlife Refuge, taken in the spring of 2022 by C.C. Lockwood.
While Jeff Hunt is now retired, Desmond Clapp lives and works in El Dorado, Arkansas today—where he still keeps a photograph and certificate com-
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a photograph Clapp took of the tree on scratch-off lottery tickets. “So, I went out and bought a bunch of those lottery tickets with that picture on them.
When Cat Island was formed in 2000—and certainly when the Champion Bald Cypress Tree was first discovered in 1981—Mississippi River flooding impacted the area much less severely and frequently than it does today. What was previously a “five year flood” of the river into Cat Island and downtown St. Francisville became an annual occurrence. “The only good thing that’s come
