Cypress

The Last Old-Growth Swamps

Awe-inspiring photographs of the ancient wetlands of the American South by National Geographic Explorer Mac Stone, highlighting spectacular webs of life below ancient cypress canopies

Cypress: The Last Old-Growth Swamps is an immersive photographic exploration of the few remaining ancient cypress forests of the American South, places where time slows, water holds memory, and ecosystems older than most civilizations still hum with life. This book invites readers on a visual journey deep into the oldest and most pristine forests on the planet.

Cypress contains stunning imagery from remote locations within the Black River in North Carolina, Francis Beidler Forest and Congaree Swamp in South Carolina, and Corkscrew Swamp in Florida, places many may never see firsthand. Captivating images reveal intimate and often hidden moments: ghost orchids blooming high in cypress trees, prothonotary warblers threading through cypress knees, and endangered panthers searching the sloughs and uplands for prey.

Mac Stone’s award-winning photographs represent over a decade spent in the field alongside ecologists, dendrochronologists, hydrologists, naturalists, and local community members. The expansive landscape photography is paired with essays and personal reflection on the complex worlds of bottomland forest that once occupied vast expanses across the southeastern United States but have been systematically drained and clearcut over time.

Today, only a handful of old-growth swamps remain. Emphasizing the resilience and recovery underway in many protected swamps, this book invites readers to not just admire these environments but to recognize them as living archives of deep time, still here, still breathing, still shaping the world, and urgently worth protecting. Cypress shows that the survival of old-growth wetlands is inseparable from our own well-being.

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