Baldcypress — Density, Movement, Workability & Cost

The "hundred-year cypress" reputation you'll hear repeated at almost every lumberyard is a description of old-growth timber that mostly stopped being cut a century ago — the second-growth baldcypress (Taxodium distichum) sold today comes from faster-grown plantation trees with meaningfully less of the heartwood extractive that made the legend true in the first place.

A reputation earned by a resource that's mostly gone

At 32 lb/ft³ and 510 lbf on the Janka scale, baldcypress is soft, light, and easy to work — it holds paint exceptionally well precisely because it moves so little relative to other softwoods. The rot resistance that built its reputation, though, was concentrated in slow-grown old-growth heartwood; today's faster-grown second-growth material carries only moderate durability, a real gap between the wood's folklore and what a buyer actually receives without asking specifically about grade.

Movement is genuinely modest either way

Tangential shrinkage of 6.2% against a radial figure of 3.8% gives a 1.6 ratio, comfortably stable and one of the reasons cypress holds exterior paint as well as it does. An 8"-wide exterior board seasoning from a wet 15% down to a drier 9% loses about 0.099" (2.5mm) across its width; run other widths and moisture swings through the wood movement calculator. A 3/4"-thick, 6"-wide, 12-foot siding board weighs about 12 lb; the wood weight calculator handles other siding dimensions.

Working it, and a specific character grade worth knowing

Ordinary cypress glues well, though some resinous stock benefits from a solvent wipe before adhesive goes on. "Pecky cypress," riddled with fungal pockets from a specific decay organism, is sold deliberately for its texture rather than avoided as a defect — it's a genuine, intentional product category rather than substandard material.

Cost, and the grade question that actually matters

At roughly $6 per board foot, baldcypress sits in this site's moderate tier. Exterior siding, greenhouses, boatbuilding, water tanks, and interior panelling are its main uses — every one of which was historically sold on the strength of old-growth durability that a buyer today genuinely needs to ask about, since second-growth material simply doesn't carry the same built-in margin of safety in ground contact or sustained wet conditions.

What to ask before you buy it for an exterior project

If durability actually matters for the application — a water tank, a dock, ground-contact framing — ask the supplier directly whether the stock is old-growth salvage or second-growth, since the difference in service life can be substantial. For a purely above-ground use like siding or trim, where paint does most of the protective work anyway, the old-growth-versus-second-growth distinction matters much less, and cypress's low movement and good paint-holding are the properties actually doing the work.

What people actually ask about baldcypress

Is there a way to tell old-growth cypress from second-growth just by looking at a board? Ring density is the tell — old-growth heartwood packs many more growth rings per inch from decades of slow bottomland growth, giving it a tighter, more uniform look, while second-growth plantation stock shows wider, more open rings even after it's milled and finished to a similar colour.

Does "pecky cypress" cost more or less than clear cypress? It typically runs close to clear stock rather than at a discount, since the character texture is deliberately selected and marketed rather than sorted out as a defect — some regional suppliers actually price heavily pecky boards at a premium for feature paneling work.

Is there a cypress grade specifically marketed for ground contact or dock use? Some suppliers sell certified old-growth salvage — reclaimed from historic structures or sinker logs recovered from riverbeds — specifically for the durability that second-growth heartwood can't match; it costs meaningfully more but is the honest answer for a project where rot resistance genuinely can't be compromised.

Why does baldcypress hold exterior paint so much better than many other softwoods? Its comparatively low, well-balanced shrinkage means a painted board doesn't flex and crack the paint film with every humidity swing the way a more movement-prone softwood would, so the coating stays intact and adhered for longer between repaints.

Baldcypress's shrinkage figures come from The Wood Database, since this species is absent from the USDA Forest Products Laboratory's main Table 4-3; its Janka hardness (510 lbf) and specific gravity, however, are tabulated directly in FPL's Table 5-3b.