Learn about Kentucky’s fleeting beauties – ephemeral wildflowers, with Nikki Nivison, Conservation Educator with the Kentucky Department of Fish & Wildlife Resources at the Salato Wildlife Center in Frankfort, Kentucky.
Katrina Kelly, Owner of EARTHeim Landscape Design, gives us a tour of some of the native spring ephemerals blooming in her garden in Lexington.
Join Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves botanist and Lichenologist Kendall McDonald as she explores what spring ephemerals are blooming at Cove Springs Park in Frankfort, KY.
Join Betty Hall in a tour of her native garden.
Join Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves botanist Rachel Cook on a virtual hike through John B. Stephenson Memorial Forest State Nature Preserve. While this Preserve is known for its beauty, Anglin Falls, it also has a great diversity of ferns with 32 species!
For over 30 years the Kentucky Native Plant Society, in partnership with Natural Bridge State Resort Park, has held a Wildflower Weekend at the park, offering wildflower hikes, exploring the region’s rich natural history and resources in the state park and the Red River Gorge, as well as evening presentations. Last year, due to COVID-19, we were forced to cancel Wildflower Weekend for the first time ever.
This year, with the pandemic still disrupting in-person activities, KNPS is hosting a virtual Wildflower Week! This will include virtual events from April 10th through April 17th, including a week-long, statewide BotanyBlitz on iNaturalist. This is an opportunity to broaden our spring wildflower scope to the entire state of Kentucky and allow us to highlight natural areas across the state! In addition to the BotanyBlitz we will have virtual field trips, led by naturalists from around the state, online workshops, a wildflower trivia contest, and more.
With so many activities, be sure to check out the Wildflower Week 2021 homepage for details and summaries of our events. In particular, refer to the WW Schedule at the bottom of the page.
Wildflower Week 2021 is shaping up to be an amazing series of native plant related activities. The centerpiece of the week will be our community science project, the 2021 BotanyBlitz. From Saturday, April 10, through Saturday, April 17, we are encouraging everyone to visit parks and natural areas throughout the Commonwealth, find and photograph plants, with an emphasis on natives in bloom, and upload them to the KNPS Wildflower Week 2021 BotanyBlitz project.
A botany blitz is an event where anyone who joins the project on iNaturalist can use a camera (or cellphone) to snap a picture of a plant, in a given area (in this case all of Kentucky), during a given time frame (in this case April 10-17), and then upload the image (called an Observation) to their iNaturalist account. At the end of the week, we will have a gallery, a map showing the locations, and totals by numbers, species, and by each person, of all the great plants we found! Expert botanists and people with a keen identifying eye will be able to add comments to your specimens on why they agree or disagree with a certain identification, so we can all learn better ways to ID plants in the future.
If you do not have an iNaturalist account, please consider setting one up and then joining the BotanyBlitz project. It’s easy and fun and each observation contributes to our knowledge of the plants of Kentucky. Nick Koenig recently wrote an article showing the simple steps to join iNaturalist and the BotanyBlitz project and a short video of how to make and upload an observation. Check it out HERE!.
If you are not already familiar with iNaturalist, take a look at the site and some of KNPS’ other projects, such as the Kentucky Botanists Big Year 2021.
We are hoping that we can get at least one observation from every county in Kentucky. Won’t you join us and show the rest of us what native plants are blooming in your county?
