Sprouting Wings at McAllen's Monarch Festival

During the last weekend that Denisa's Mother will be in South Texas, we discovered that the City of McAllen was hosting a Monarch Festival at Quinta Mazatlan. After 33 winters in this area, she had never been to this festival or visited Quinta Mazatlan. So alrighty then, we obviously have to take her and our friend Barbara to the festival.

We were greeted with lots of color. The orange umbrellas overhead and the rose bougainvillea made for a stunning entry.

Bougainvillea is one of Denisa's favorite plants, and this was a very healthy specimen. Quinta Mazatlan was once a citrus plantation that has grown into a botanical garden that displays native plants for its visitors.

The festival stage was filled with colorful dancers most of the day. Those dancers ranged from carefully choreographed pairs from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley campus . . .

to not as carefully choreographed little girls in their beautiful Hispanic costumes.

We also went to the cooking class offered that day, where local foods were used in interesting combinations. The chef is demonstrating a grapefruit and mango salad with a fennel and garlic dressing.

Afterwards, we got a generous sample of the dressing and salad for ourselves.

We also went on the guided nature walk, where we found some of the ingredients for that salad. The chef used yucca blooms in the salad, like the ones pictured below. We tasted some on our walk. Who knew that yucca blooms tasted much like lettuce?!

The blog word of the day is "ornithophilous." That is the name of a category of plants pollinated by birds. If you break it into pieces you have ornith (bird) and philous (love). Try working that new word into your conversation when you describe plants like this specimen with colorful tubular blooms just waiting for a hummingbird to visit and move its pollen to other flowers.

Our tour guide was knowledgeable about many of the plants at Quinta Mazatlan. Denisa asked him the scientific name of the common-looking cactus we saw.

He was completely right with his answer "Opuntia Engelmannii". He thought it was interesting that our name was Engelman and we had a long-lost botanist in the family tree.

The displays inside the hacienda included this beautifully simple chrysalis from which the monarch will eventually make its appearance. We see another of God's wonders when we see the detail of that tiny gold band on each chrysalis. It's another wonder that a beautiful butterfly will emerge, and it all starts with that ugly old caterpillar that is blurred on the left side of the picture.

Speaking of ugly caterpillars, we also got a close up of this tobacco horn worm. If you look closely, you can even see that horn on the left. Instead of a beautiful butterfly, he will become a brown winged creature that is the foe of the tobacco farmer.

We had an educational and interesting day at McAllen's third annual Monarch Festival. The grounds were filled with people of all ages that had sprouted wings for the day.

Some of those people with wings even looked a little familiar.