March 16, 2019. It’s Saturday of Louisiana Master Naturalist’s annual 3-day meeting called “Rendezvous.” This year we met in Fountainbleau State Park on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain.

Fountainbleau has a lot to offer naturalists. It’s also ideal habitat for cross vine (Bignonia capreolata), one of my fave native plants. I began looking for its distinctive sets of four leaves, actually two pairs of two leaves, going up the straight trunks of trees long before I saw a flower.

But when I finally did see a flower? Wow! I thought immediately of Tom Wolfe’s book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby.

March is the ideal month for flowering cross vine and at Fountainbleau I walked up on a huge one. As is often the case with cross vine, I saw fallen flowers on the ground first. And when I looked up…. WOW! The trunk of the vine at eye level was at least three inches in diameter and it was loaded with flowers high on the host tree.

Wolfe was writing about a car. I’ll feast my eyes on these gorgeous babes any day, thank you very much!

#BestOf2019 #YearInReview