This cache is a plastic wide-mouthed jar located in beautiful Lake D’Arbonne State Park; day passes are $3 per person, allowing access between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. It is a very short walk from the road leading to the campsites and cabins, just off the Orange Trail.
One of the many delightful plants you may discover at the cache site and throughout the park is the Red Buckeye (Aesculus pavia), a small deciduous tree native to the southeastern United States. It grows as an understory tree, usually reaching only 8-10 feet tall. It is one of the first trees to leaf out in the spring, and it is easily identified by its distinctive leaf pattern. Five to seven serrated leaflets, each 3-6” long, radiate from the end of each stem in a palmately compound finger-like arrangement.
The showy scarlet blossoms make an early spring appearance as well, budding in clusters from 4-10” spikes. Each tubular flower is about 1½” long, with stamens extending beyond the tube. Therefore, they are custom-designed for pollination by ruby-throated hummingbirds, which are returning across the Gulf of Mexico from their winter home in southern Mexico and Central America. Usually the males migrate northward several weeks before the females and juveniles. The males have an urgent drive to reach their breeding grounds and establish a territory which offers an ample food supply, before the females arrive. Famished from their efforts, the nectar of the red buckeye flowers is critical to their survival. This seasonal orchestration of bloom and migration pattern was observed by the folk of past generations, who anticipated “the hummingbirds return when the red buckeyes bloom” as a welcome sign of spring.
The pollinated flowers produce fruits with a smooth, light brown capsule, about 3 inches in diameter, which splits open to drop 2-3 seeds in early autumn. Each seed bears a pale, prominent scar at its former point of attachment to the capsule; thus they have an amazing resemblance to the brown eye of a deer, complete with a reflective cornea. This seed has long been considered a good-luck charm in some areas of the South, where it is traditional to carry a red buckeye “nut” to improve fortune and to ward off ailments.