A smiling young woman in a powder-blue antebellum ball gown reaches up to touch the enormous sausage-shaped fruits dangling like oversized pendulums from the gnarled branches of a Kigelia africana tree at Florida's famous Cypress Gardens — a whimsical, sun-soaked scene that perfectly encapsulates the mid-century roadside-attraction postcard at its most charming and peculiar. Cypress Gardens, the beloved botanical theme park near Winter Haven, Florida, was famous for its water-ski shows, gorgeous gardens, and the "Southern Belle" models who posed in period costumes throughout the grounds; here one of those Belles introduces visitors to the park's exotic specimen "Sausage Tree" (Kigelia pinnata), a native of sub-Saharan Africa whose fruits can weigh up to 10 kg and hang on rope-like stalks — utterly unlike anything else in a Florida garden. The vivid chrome color was produced by Florida Natural Color, Inc. of Miami and printed by Koppel Color Cards of Hawthorne, N.J. (catalog FNC 5892 / 126677). The back copy notes this as "one of the many interesting varieties of trees to be seen at Florida's Beautiful Cypress Gardens." Cypress Gardens opened in 1936, became a Florida landmark through the 1940s–70s, and closed in 2009; images featuring the Southern Belle models are especially nostalgic for collectors of Florida tourism ephemera.