MONTEZUMA CYPRESS PRESERVE PROTECTS REMAINING OLD-GROWTH TREES

 

Eugene Fernandez studies massive Montezuma cypresses at the Brownsville preserve. (Tiffany Hofeldt)

By Cameron Maynard
Texas Highways

Eugene Fernandez steps out of his old 4Runner, holding a walking cane in one hand and a rusted machete in the other. We’re standing in an empty field, across from a row of residential houses along La Posada Drive in Brownsville. 

A local historian and expert on the Montezuma cypress (Taxodium mucronatum), Fernandez points toward the tree line as he explains how this place—the Montezuma Cypress Preserve, adjacent to La Posada Park—is the last remaining stand of old-growth Montezuma cypress in the United States. 

“The Spaniards calculated there were 10,000 of these trees,” Fernandez says, referring to the population as it once stood across the Rio Grande Valley. “The reason they’re no longer here is they’re the only viable lumber tree. That’s what happens with being too beautiful. They’ll hack away at you.”

We step through a curtain of foliage, and suddenly the preserve expands in all directions, an oasis of 41 hulking Montezumas up and down the dry resaca bed. We walk underneath the arches of an old brick bridge—a restored relic from 1898 that once enabled visitors to cross the resaca when it flooded. Fernandez points his machete toward a large tree with a flared trunk that he likens to the twirling dress of a tango dancer, and he stops abruptly when he almost steps on a seedling.

The preserve is a half-mile tract of palm fronds and snaking branches laden with the leaves of Montezumas, their large canopies reminiscent of the windblown wilt of Spanish moss.

As a specimen, the Montezuma is incredibly impressive. It can live for thousands of years, and it can grow to widths nearly unmatched by other species; Mexico’s El Árbol del Tule has an astonishing circumference of around 145 feet. 

On the U.S. side in the RGV, prominent trees include Monty, a 900-year-old behemoth near Abram; a massive tree along the Rio Grande near Salineño Bird Preserve; and a small collection on private properties around San Benito.

The trees’ root systems have historically acted as natural stabilizers for the banks of Rio Grande Delta waterways, and before modern medicine, its gummy resin and charred bark were regularly used to relieve conditions ranging from gout to bronchitis. But today, even as the tree continues to thrive across Mexico, Fernandez believes only 200 or so remain in the Valley due to development. Preserves like Brownsville’s are crucial for the trees’ protection and for maintaining the historic lineage that spans both sides of the border.

Montezuma cypresses have been documented in what is now Mexico as far back as the 1400s, during the reign of the poet king Nezahualcóyotl, and they were a particular favorite of the Aztec ruler Montezuma II.

In 1520, when the Aztec people drove Hernán Cortés out of Tenochtitlan, it was a Montezuma cypress that he supposedly sat and wept under. Starting around the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, Montezumas were increasingly cut down to make causeways and railroads, and by the completion of the St. Louis, Brownsville, and Mexico Railway in 1904, the trees had almost entirely disappeared. “Wood yards lined the Rio Grande every 30 miles on the U.S. side,” Fernandez says. 

“Steamboats would stock their boilers with that.” For a tree that once ranged from Brownsville to Camargo, Mexico, it became difficult to find.

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