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.
Enjoying this article?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.
By the 1920s, when the citrus industry ushered in Brownsville’s second land boom, agricultural interests uprooted the remaining Montezumas and strangled their habitat. In 1927, a silent movie called The Lure of the Rio Grande Valley was produced to entice Chicagoans to relocate from their freezing winters to the temperate climes of the RGV. The film projects these words on the screen: “This wonderful development stands today where there was nothing but desert and jungle 10 years ago. The work of clearing still goes on.”
While the growth of agriculture tremendously benefited the region, this new era of land and water management—including extensive irrigation systems—fundamentally changed how water naturally flowed across the terrain. “The river flooding and old distributaries are now very much controlled because it’s an international border,” says Alejandro Fierro-Cabo, a professor in the School of Earth, Environmental, and Marine Sciences at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. This has drastically affected the system of resacas, oxbow-like bodies of water that once captured the Rio Grande’s overflow but are now artificially fed by the Brownsville Public Utilities Board. Around Brownsville, only 1% of these naturally occurring oases remain, meaning most of the Montezuma’s native habitat is gone
When Montezumas are plentiful and living together along waterways, they help create riparian forests. These wooded areas expand terrestrial and aquatic habitats, provide cooler temperatures, and increase carbon storage. But for Montezuma cypresses that stand alone, “they do not have the ecological function of a riparian forest,” Fierro-Cabo says. “The ecological function is lost.”
Nevertheless, individuals are trying to reintroduce the Montezuma cypress as a key element of the Rio Grande Valley landscape. Bill Green, a forester for the South Texas, Coastal Bend, and RGV regions with the Texas A&M Forest Service, holds Montezuma cypress giveaways. He hands out trees cultivated in College Station to residential homeowners, local governments, school districts, and attendees at conferences like the UTRGV Food Summit. “It’s not a real formal initiative,” Green says, “but we are getting more trees in the ground.” In addition, Fernandez currently has 250 saplings for future planting at his on-site nursery in the Montezuma Cypress Preserve. After growing in pots for a year and a half, the 4-foot-tall trees are then planted in the ground. By year six, the trees are tall enough for a person to stand under for shade.
Local governments and nonprofits are also working toward restoration. BPUB’s resaca improvement plans include re-sloping banks and adding clay liners. Volunteers with the Montezuma Cypress Preserve are working to find a way to keep it permanently flooded and connected within the larger resaca network. The city of Brownsville has supported these efforts and, in 2014, adopted the Montezuma as its official tree.
As Fernandez and I step out of the preserve, back into the empty field, it’s clear how much this tree has given to the history of the region. While it will never have the reach it once did, reintroducing it into the ecosystem feels more possible than before. “This is our legacy,” Fernandez says. “This is where we came from. We didn’t come from a parking lot.”
