 Hi there, my name is Devin Rogers and I'm a botanist with the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. Today I'm going to be taking you on a tour of some dry limestone woodlands in the Frankfurt area, mostly in Franklin County. Now this first site that I'm looking at is on a southwest facing slope above a side tributary to the Kentucky River. And what we typically see in these environments is that you have steep slopes, of course this isn't the steepest that we'll see, but we get a bunch of mossy rocks, oftentimes very highly erodible soils. Now even though these are drier sites, the soil is still really rich, really dark. Just these loams and clays derive from limestone. So in the spring we still get a pretty rich flora. It's kind of surprising that this is what we would consider a dry slope with just how covered it is with spring ephemeral wildflowers that also grow in mesic stands. One thing that's important to note about these systems is like everywhere else in the bluegrass, we have some severe invasion of honeysuckle. I'm going to just pan upslope. We can just see how closed in it is going upslope. And then down below here where we've been actively managing for honeysuckle is just wide open. This becomes a problem because there's so many interesting things that grow up here. We have some of our common wildflowers like pachora oboveda. Also not quite up yet is delphinium trichorne. Of course this species is pretty common throughout a number of different rich forest types, but we do see it in some higher abundance up on these drier slopes. Some other common things like spring beauty, claytonia virginica. And some of these dota cafeon aren't fully up yet. Here's one that's in bloom. Just a remarkable, pendulous flower that reflects petals. Big basil rosette. And there's just tons of it in here. It's not quite in bloom like a number of other things. This grassy plant or grass looking plant is a type of lily called camassia siloides. And it's unfortunate that's not in bloom yet because this slope will just be covered with camassia. But there's still some interesting rare species here. Just noted one. It's a federally threatened herb in the Brassacaceae, the mustard family. This is not yet in bloom. This is visaria globosa, globe bladder pod. And it's going to end up having a longer seam of yellow flowers that mature into these globe shaped silicols, which is a fruit type of the mustard family. But those globe shaped silicols is how it gets its name, bladder pod. Again, unfortunate it's not in bloom right now. But there's at least 50 to 100 plants probably on this slope, maybe more. And another thing that's not quite up yet that is quite common on this slope, which is another rare species, not federally protected but state rare in Kentucky. And this is eastern yampa, peridoridia americana. The canopy in some of these communities is traditionally going to be eastern red cedar, juniperus virginiana. And usually, I don't know if you can see this tree here, it's a quarkus mule and burgii. But you get a lot more quarkus mule and burgii and juniperus and blue ash, fractionous quadrangulata on these slopes than you do some of the other areas of the bluegrass. Let's take a walk around and see what else we can find. Here we got our Cecil Trilliums, which may have been mentioned in some of the other Wildflower Week videos. Just such a beautiful little native trillium. We're going next to another great specimen, this dodecatheon mediae. All right, so I was really hoping to find this really charismatic Silene. I guess it's not really a fire pink, but there's a species of Silene in the chickweed family that grows up here. And it's just not in bloom yet. Silene caroliniana, what I think is subspecies wereii. It has these beautiful light pink flowers, occasionally white. And I'll show you a picture of it and talk about it, but couldn't find any in bloom today. So let's move on to the next site and see what else we can find in bloom. All right, we're out here at a new site looking around for some neat plants that grow on these dry limestone woodlands. And this is a much steeper site. It's a lot more loose limestone, almost talus-like in some areas. But at this site, the trees really only get to be about 50 foot tall. A lot of them are very small. Not sure if that's from the extreme conditions, stunting their growth. But the trees are very short, gnarly. There is some ash mortality in here. But we get not only a woodland because of that open canopy, but then as we move down to the other stratas of the community, we get a lot more native shrubs. And then a pretty rich herb layer. Again, some of this stuff is just now bolting. So we have some early spring wildflowers that have already gone to fruit or already even dropped their fruit with this delectrum diolacum. Let's look around and see what we can find. All right, now we're up here on this high woodland, a little bit of a drier site. And along with some interesting herbs, there are also some interesting shrubs that like these dry habitats. One is sweet sumac or fragrant sumac, roost aromatica. This is a cool species. You can find it on dry limestone outcrops and woodlands as well as glades. Right now, one herb that I hope we can find some in flower. But it's starting to bolt and it's going to be flowering very soon. This is yellow pimpernel, tinnidia integoraima. And this is another one that while it doesn't always or only grow on dry sites, we find it in pretty good abundance. And it's one of the dominant plants that you're seeing growing throughout this one area. Some cool things that are going on in the herbaceous layer. Of course, again, another thing that's not in flower yet, but with these really widely ovate leaves and a more truncate base, sometimes it can be cordate. This is solidegos facelata. There's another thing that likes these dry upper slopes and woodlands. This will go over here. Pretty cool violet. I believe this is Viola subsinuata. You'll notice it has way more of these very deeply dissected lobes, usually seven to nine. A pretty little violet flower with hairs on the inside. There's a lot of it on this slope. All right, now there's one woody shrub that I was walking past that I've been looking for. And I didn't notice it until I put my hand on it for balance and got pricked by these stipular thorns. It's pretty cool. It's blooming right now. This is xanthoxalum americinum. Sometimes people call it toothache tree. There's a lot of the chemical compounds in it to prevent herbivory. I think if you chew on a little bit of the leaves, it'll make your mouth run numb. Not that I'm recommending that, definitely not. But as these stipular thorns and eventually has a compound, canately compound leaf, really beautiful flowers. Now I know you can find Ohio Buckeye in a number of different communities, but it also likes some of these dry woodlands. I just love that flower. Oh boy, this is exciting right here. So we're looking at another rare plant. This is a species of wild rye called Svensson's wild rye, which grows in these dry limestone woodlands. And it shares a distribution pattern with both the globe bladder pod, as well as bronze rock crests. And that these plants grow here in the upper bluegrass or outer bluegrass and then jump all the way down to the natural basin of Tennessee. I think to see all this grass that is growing throughout this one site, I think the majority of that is this Svensson's wild rye. And it looks a lot like Elemis Histrix, except instead of the orens coming out at a straight angle with the florets, the florets are more pressed, meaning up against the rachis or the stem, and then the orens bend off like that. That's the easiest way to tell Svensson's wild rye from just regular old Elemis Histrix. Oh boy, we hit the jackpot. Now as I've been walking through here, I noticed a lot of individuals of globe bladder pod, viscera globosa, but there's a couple plants here that have started to bloom. It's the classic mustard flower, but really exciting with everything that has been just barely about to bloom. We got a flowering individual viscera globosa. All right, we found another species in bloom. This is a spiderwort, a type of spiderwort that we will find a lot of times in these dry woodlands. This is Tradescantia subaspera, and the one way you can differentiate this species from the also widespread Tradescantia virginiana is that the leaf becomes constricted as it reaches this subpediolar sheath, which is this feature here. If I was to take that whole sheath off, the width of the sheath, if you cut it open would be still narrower than the leaf blade. There's some other characters like stomata density on the leaves, but I'm pretty confident this is Tradescantia subaspera. Beautiful leaf flower. I just noticed a neat plant that I guess does grow in these outcrop communities, but I haven't seen any today. This is a native cactus. This is Appuncia cespitosa. I'm not going to touch it because I don't want any of these glockids, so there's tiny little prickly hairs in those nodes. I don't want any of those in my finger, but it kind of needs to run across native cactus up here. It makes sense with how dry it is and rocky it is. We got another flower in bloom. This, of course, is the more common species of silene firepink, silene virginica. It doesn't always grow in these dry sites, but really beautiful red flower. All right, I'm out here on the slopes above Elkhorn Creek looking at a perennial draba. This is draba remosissima, very different from some of the other annual drabas that are more weedy. This perennial herb grows along dry, rocky outcrop woodlands in Kentucky. In the bluegrass, we get a lot of populations around Elkhorn Creek and over top some of the tributaries in the Kentucky River. Just a really pretty little herb. Producing those classic brassicaceae siliques.