 Hi, my name is Rachel Cook and I'm a botanist with the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. Today I'm going to be showing you all the common early spring ferns of John B. Stephenson Memorial Forest, commonly called Anglin Falls. The John B. Stephenson Memorial Forest State Nature Preserve is a 123-acre wooded gorge in Rockcastle County that features Anglin Creek, a rich spring floral display, and the 75-foot-tall Anglin Falls. So this is probably our most common fern across Kentucky. You'll find it just like this kind of band out all along the ground. It's called Christmas Furn. Its Latin name is Polystichum Acrosticoides, don't ask me to spell that. And you can find it in a wide variety of habitats. You'll find it kind of like we are here in like a music lowland area, but you can find it especially in Eastern Kentucky up and down mountain sides. It's more of a habitat generalist and it is an easy one to tell. And if you look over here you can see it really cool. This is what a new leaf looks like unfurling and we call these fiddleheads. This is our sharp-lobed grape fern, it is a native fern that has overwintering leaves. This is one of the bigger specimens I've seen. Some notable features are its overall arrowhead shape. There are some lookalike species, none of which have overwintering leaves like this one. Its Latin name is Gritidium by Trinatum. They're some very closely related species that come out a little bit farther into the year, but this is the most common one. It's very easy to ID. So this is one of my personal favorite ferns. This is walking fern or Aspillinium rhizophyllum. So the coolest feature about this fern is it sends out these little runners and eventually they turn into all new plants. You can see right there those are baby plants. This is an incredibly distinct fern. You're not going to find very much like it even though the genus Aspillinium does like to hybridize. This one is, it's just so beautiful and unique. And as you can see here, you'll mostly find it on the sides of boulders and it likes moist boulders where you see like this moss kind of. And yeah, this one's one of my favorites. This is Southern bladder fern or Cystophorus patrusa. This little guy is very small and dainty. It has a nice texture and you can kind of see these new leaves starting to unfurl. So these ferns are found in wetwoods all across Kentucky. So if you have moist soils, you will find these, they're kind of scattered throughout. You'll find them very close to rocks and sometimes on moss substrates. And they are a very common little fern. They can be easily confused with woodsia which is another genus of fern and it's kind of hard to parse the two out. But once you get an eye for them, they are pretty easy and cute little guys. So this is one of our limestone loving species called rock polypodi or polypodium virginianum. So there are two species in this genus. There's this common one virginianum which is longer and more slender. And then there's Appalachiana which is shorter and stouter. And another really interesting thing that you can look at on the back of the fertile fronds is the sorai. And as you can tell, these are also older leaves. You can see some of the newer leaves coming up here. So this is a calcifile so you'll find it on rocky boulders in calcium rich areas. So this is marginal wood fern. It is a frequent flier across Kentucky. You'll find it in a lot of moist woods. They like hillsides. So this one has some very close relatives and the easiest way you can identify it versus its other relatives is if you look at the sorai, they're on the edge right there. That's why its latin name is Dryopterous Marginalis. And you often see it, these are kind of sad because they're again the winter leaves, but it's usually like up and arching. In the springtime now you'll see it kind of like the Christmas fern, it'll lay flat just like this.