By Nick Koenig
As summer is coming to a close, I have tried to be in the field botanizing around as much as possible. One of my favorite places to look around for plant life is the Miller-Welch Central Kentucky Wildlife Management Area located between Richmond and Berea. The area has been of great interest to me for the past three field seasons. Wildlife management areas are not the first place a botanist would venture to look for unexpected plant life. The purpose is for managing wildlife and the land managers do such a fantastic job at doing such. However, a favorable consequence to managing wildlife is often managing the plant life equally.
(Left) Location of the Central Kentucky Wildlife Management Area, Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife.
(Right) Picture from Central in powerline way, August 2021, Nick Koenig.
As I was trekking through a wet, mesic field following the powerlines, kept open by the managers, I was finding native plants left and right. Anglepod milkvine, butterfly milkweed, moonseed, asters, sedges galore, trumpet vine… the list could go on and on. But what caught my eye was the pink flower below. I had not ever encountered a species like this in Madison County before or ever. After some keying, I was perplexed, a native loosestrife. Whenever I hear loosestrife, I am usually in “plant-yanking” mode, ready to grab any invasive purple loosestrife insight. But this was not the case.
Winged Loosestrife (Lythrum alatum) from Central KY Wildlife Management Area, August 2021, Nick Koenig.
Winged Loosestrife or Lythrum alatum (alate translating to wings in Latin, similarly to how “escalate” means to raise) is a plant species in the Loosestrife family with strong wings on the stem and lacking hairs. The flowers are light pink with one or two from one axil and the leaves ranging from ovate to lanceolate, with the entire plant not going over three feet tall (Illinois Wildflowers). What was most unexpected about the find was its occurrence in Madison County, Kentucky. By using the website SERNEC (Southeast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections https://sernecportal.org/portal/), one can call on collections of a plant species to see when a plant was documented, where, and by who, along with many other details. Some species are kept disclosed for protecting the integrity of the population/species.
By making a query of all Lythrum alatum in Madison County, Kentucky, the results give rise to only one collection. On July 10, 1937, Mary Wharton (botanist-extraordinaire and in the Kentucky Native Plant Society’s Kentucky Botantist Hall of Fame) found the same species in an “open oak-hickory woods.”
Dr. Mary Wharton, Kentucky Native Plant Society Kentucky Botany Hall of Fame Profile.
The specimen is stored in a herbarium (plant specimen repository) at the University of Michigan herbarium and pictured below.
Winged Loosestrife (Lythrum alatum) specimen from the University of Michigan Herbarium collected by Dr. Mary Wharton, SERNEC Portal.
Not only does the specimen hold the story of a wonderful Kentucky native plant, it holds the story of a botanist. Knowing roughly one month ago, 84 years ago, Dr. Wharton (founder of Floracliff Nature Sanctuary and author of multiple field guides) when she was at the age of 24, was too intrigued by a species of flowering plant enough to collect it and document its occurrence. The stories of plant species and plant collectors alike are stored in the specimens housed in herbaria.
Citations
Illinois Wildflowers
https://www.illinoiswildflowers.info/wetland/plants/wng_loosestrife.htm
Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife
Click to access MillerWelch-CentralKentuckyWMA_ALL.pdf
SERNEC Portal
https://sernecportal.org/portal/