Did you know that the Kentucky Native Plant Society offers small grants to help defer the costs of botanical research, inventory and native plant restoration? Since 2012, KNPS has awarded $8,100 to students working in these areas. Another $750 was awarded in prior years. The total number of grants awarded in any given year is based on the number of proposals received, the quality of proposals and available funding. The graph below shows the kinds of projects that have been funded.
The second type of grant is new and is open to anyone. It will fund
1. native plant inventory, or
2. rare and native plant restoration.
Native plant inventory grants are limited to Kentucky locations and successful applicants will receive a maximum of $250. Rare and native plant restoration grants are awarded to applicants working with native Kentucky plants, preferentially those which are globally rare (G1, G2). Successful applicants will be awarded a maximum of $500. All rare and native plant restoration grants require coordination with the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves (OKNP) and the Kentucky Native Plant Conservation Alliance coordinators prior to application.
A grant proposal must include:
A current curriculum vitae;
A proposal (not to exceed two single-spaced typed pages) describing the proposed research and the role the grant would play in the research;
An itemized budget;
A letter of recommendation from the applicant’s major professor or project director; and
Indicate whether the grant request is for a student research grant, a native plant inventory grant or a rare and native plant restoration grant.
If the grant is for rare and native plant restoration, include a letter of support from OKNP.
Budget items typically funded include travel to research sites and supplies such as herbarium paper and lab consumables. No personnel time will be funded.
All Grant Proposals are due by April 1st, 2022.
If you are interested in applying for any of the KNPS grants, visit the Grants page at the KNPS website. If, after reading the grants page, you have any questions, please email them to: grants@knps.org
In 2015, I began to visit Hisle Park in northeast Fayette County on a regular basis. Every time I drove out there, I was mystified by a property on Briar Hill Road where a very large number of young oaks grew in a dense plantation. In the winter and early spring, a house became visible at the end of a long curving driveway. What contrast to the surrounding pastures where horses grazed in expansive fields! Who created this planting and for what purpose?
Ann Whitney Garner
Then, in the summer of 2020, I met Ann Whitney Garner, the owner, and she invited me to her farm. On that first visit I drove through the opened gate with intense expectation and followed the driveway in awe at the extent of the plantation. The trees growing in rows stretched almost up to the residence. Ann Whitney showed me the garden, chicken coop, barn and small tree nursery behind the house, then took me through a small natural woodland to a substantial creek, David’s Branch, that forms the rear border of the property.
A view from the entrance gate.
She and her husband Allen Garner bought this 20-acre lot in 2006. In 2008, they moved with their three school-aged children into their newly constructed home and engaged a landscape contractor to design and install the plantings typical of Bluegrass residences: many boxwoods, cherry laurels, which are now dead, and more than 500 liriope plants, which Ann Whitney has since dug up and discarded.
The Garners do not come from farm backgrounds, yet they wanted to use their land for some kind of agrarian activity that would reduce the amount of mowing on their empty space. They knew that they did not want horses. They considered a vineyard but found out that their land was too alkaline. They played with the idea of growing corn or organic tobacco but had to acknowledge that they would get no return on their investment of money and effort.
They knew that they cared about nature, and Ann Whitney anticipated the moment when her children would go to high school and then college, and she looked forward to a new kind of work. She couldn’t exactly define what it would be, but she wanted to work on her property. In 2010, she had an epiphany: “Why don’t we grow what’s supposed to be here,” she asked herself and her family. She had walked her property almost daily pondering what she observed: the way bush honeysuckle and winter creeper intruding from the perimeter suppressed the regeneration of plants, and the possibilities offered by the large expanse of open space. It occurred to her that the property called for trees, because that is what Nature would plant on it. Trees would create wildlife habitat, beauty and—in the very long term—financial value.
The Kentucky Division of Forestry helped her move forward with her project providing several forest management plans, offering tree seedlings for a very reasonable price and eventually loaning her a mechanical tree planter. During the first year she ordered and planted 100 trees: many redbuds, some pecans, sycamores, and bur oaks. Then she put in an order of 300 trees, including many bald cypress for a low-lying area.
Oaks planted with the help of a mechanical tree planter.
Then, in 2013, the Garners took a big plunge ordering 5,000 oak seedlings, 1,000 each of swamp white, bur, northern red, Shumard and chinquapin oak. They chose oaks knowing that they would be slow-growing and not immediately overwhelm them with labor-intensive management tasks. They also assumed that an investment in oaks can provide a financial return in the distant future when selective harvesting for some kind of a niche market may become feasible. Also, Ann Whitney had taken note of Doug Tallamy’s argument in Bringing Nature Home, that oaks are immensely valuable as habitat trees and a food source for a huge variety of caterpillars thereby sustaining a large bird population.
When they ordered their 5,000 oaks, the Garners knew from experience that this number could not be planted with shovels, and that is where the mechanical tree planter came in. Hitched to a tractor, it carves grooves in the ground where individual workers riding on the machine place bare root plants at regular intervals. The entire Garner family participated in planting the oaks which turned into a surprisingly efficient and gratifying project.
Encouraged by their success with the oaks, they embarked on their last large planting endeavor two years later by installing 1,000 tulip poplars in a remaining empty space behind the house. Ann Whitney had observed how fast the poplars grew and decided she wanted to speed along the development of a canopy cover on at least part of the property.
With the restoration of the Bluegrass underway, birds became more abundant, and the soil began to absorb water more readily due to the expanding roots that channel it into the ground. But with the planting done, new questions arose: How does one live as a good steward on a property into which one has invested so much time, energy and money? Does the property lend itself to other uses that are still compatible with the goal of sustaining Nature?
In 2019, Ann Whitney started a tree nursery. Having handled thousands of tree seedlings over almost ten years, she concluded: “I can do this myself.” She studied up on propagation techniques and collected seeds of native trees growing in the Bluegrass.
Nursery trees tucked in for the winter.
She wants to inspire other property owners to follow her example restoring the Bluegrass, creating habitat for wildlife and helping the soil heal. She would like to make resources available to help them get started, and first and foremost among these are young trees. At this point her nursery has a number of native species available in 3- and 5-gallon containers. Her website is at https://www.fieldstoforest.com/.
Many landowners in Kentucky live on properties that they do not imagine ever returning to agricultural use. In Fayette County a single residential house can be built on 20-acre lots outside the urban service boundary with the official explanation that it serves agricultural activities, even though there is rarely any evidence of them. Instead, one drives past large lots with a house in the distance, possibly a few trees here and there, but otherwise with the ground covered in turf grass subject to a relentless mowing regime. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Ann Whitney Garner let her land speak to her. She walked on it and she worked on it. And she reflected on what she saw. She considered agricultural ventures. She became interested in ecology reading about plants and the animals they sustain. She sought professional advice and consulted with local arborists and biologists. Now, more than ten years after the big decision was made to reforest her land, she says: “I just know this is what we are supposed to do on this kind of property.”
Plants Mentioned in this Article
Buxus sempervirens – boxwood
Carya illinoinensis – pecan
Cercis canadensis – redbud
Euonymus fortunei – wintercreeper
Liriodendron tulipifera – tulip poplar
Liriope muscari
Lonicera maackii – bush honeysuckle
Platanus occidentalis – sycamore
Prunus laurocerasus – cherry laurel
Quercus bicolor – swamp white oak
Quercus macrocarpa – bur oak
Quercus muehlenbergii – chinquapin oak
Quercus rubra – northern red oak
Quercus shumardii – shumard oak
Taxodium distichum – bald cypress
Beate Popkin is the owner of Living Gardens, a Landscape Consulting business in central Kentucky. She is also the President of the Lexington Chapter of Wild Ones, Native Plants/Natural Landscapes, an environmental advocacy group. She lives in Lexington where she manages a number of native plant gardens on public and private ground.
By Deborah White, Kentucky Native Plant Society Board
Winter is a good time to focus on trees, and The Arboretum, State Botanical Garden of Kentucky, in Lexington is a wonderful place to make a start in improving your identification skills.
Not only have they purposefully planted many of the trees growing across all the natural regions of Kentucky, a project beginning in 1991, but the Arboretum Explorer mobile platform also has a mapped location and identifies the species. So, you can walk up to a tree in the Arboretum, come up with an identification, and check your guess right there.
Janet James photographed the native trees and shrubs at the Arboretum (her project for the Master Naturalist program)–that’s 200 species. She photographed tree bark, leaves, buds, flowers, fruits, and form (and in different seasons) to assist in learning.
Robert Paratley, UK Herbarium Curator and professor, has already used these photos to help teach his dendrology class. “I am always trying to pass along good resources, especially visual images, to help my students learn tree identification,” he says. “Janet James’ images in Arboretum Explorer comprise an excellent portfolio to help them. Her photos are accurate, visually clear, and highlight key identification characters.”
So, if you have been meaning to learn trees by their bark, buds and beyond, try this wonderful tool. And then start over when the trees leaf out!
Deborah White has been a botanist for the Kentucky Office of Nature Preserves and Florida state plant conservation programs.
As we send out our last newsletter of the year, I wanted to give thanks to all our membership for supporting Kentucky Native Plant Society over the years and to all of the new members who continue to give me hope for our growing organization. We have been able to accomplish a lot this year as an organization, from organizing several virtual meetings, hosting a few in person hikes as well as contributing to native plant documentation through our inaturalist projects and plant atlas and distribution efforts. Our grants program continues to fund important native plant research conducted by students at universities and has expanded to include rare plant restoration efforts. The ladyslipper continues to be a monthly resource to find the latest native plant news and our website is continually improving as we provide compile native plant resources such as native plant sales, nurseries, herbariums and general native plant information . Our last organized event of the year, the annual Kentucky Botanical Symposium, is next Wednesday, December 8th, 9am-11:30am EST, and I encourage everyone to join in and learn about some current native plant projects programs occurring across our state and also learn from nearby state partners on existing programs that we could network or model here in Kentucky. I hope that everyone has had time to see the beautiful fall colors and the first glimpse of the frost flowers here in Kentucky, I know my family has enjoyed the first frost flower finds! Please check our website for any updates, upcoming planned events, visit our gear shop for gifts for friends and family, and visit a nearby natural area to view all of our wonderful native plants as they transition into winter. One of my favorite winter native plant activities is moss and lichen hunting, native plant wreath making, and reviewing the bud and bark characters of our many native trees.
Have a great December and upcoming Holiday fellow native plant enthusiasts!
For the love of Kentucky Plants,
Tara Rose Littlefield
Littlefield Berry Family Enjoying the first frost flowers (from wingstem, Verbesena occidentalis) of the year in Anderson County, Kentucky,2021-11-06.
Xerohydric Prairie remnant, Russell County, Kentucky, Eastern Highland Rim. @T. Littlefield
Wednesday, December 8, 9AM-1130AM EST, virtual and free
“Coming Together to Discuss Current Botany Projects: Conservation and Collaboration in Kentucky and Beyond”
Kentucky Native Plant Society (KNPS) is hosting our annual botanical symposium on Wednesday, December 8th from 9AM-1130AM EST. For several years, KNPS has organized a botanical symposium in the fall/winter with a goal of bringing together professionals, community scientists, academics, researchers, gardeners and students in order to learn about what’s going on in the world of Kentucky Botany and beyond. Please join us!
To Kentucky Native Plant Society members and general native plant stakeholders! While the symposium agenda will highlight updates from Kentucky native plant society, the office of Kentucky Nature Preserves, and our main speakers from division of water, NRCS/Quail Forever/Southeastern Grasslands Initiative, and the Illinois plants of concern program, there will also be a section devoted to hearing about native plants projects from KNPS members and native plant stakeholders like YOU! If you would like to be included in this section, please send an email to Tara Littlefield @ tara.littlefield@ky.gov about the native plant project you are working on and you will be added to our stakeholder announcements section.
We are very excited to announce the agenda, featuring updates from botanists/ecologists from the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves on state listings, adding plants to the state wildlife action plan, adopting a rockhouse in the RRG, implemented plant conservation conservation horticulture projects, and current monitoring programs; updates from Kentucky Native Plant Society board members on upcoming meetings and projects; Chris Benda, the Illinois botanizer, will be talking about the rare plant monitoring program he leads in southern Illinois, Brittney Viers will discuss working with private landowners to restore remnant prairies, Joey Shaw will discuss the Tennessee-Kentucky Plant Atlas, and Brittany White will provide updates on the Wetland Assessments conducted by Kentucky Division of Water. Click on the PDF below for the agenda.
Kentucky Botanical Symposium 2021 Speakers and Facilitators :
Brittney Viers, QF/NRCS TN State Coordinator/Southeastern Grasslands Initiative Liaison will be discussing Remnant Grassland Restoration on Private Lands in Kentucky and Tennessee.
“I’m originally from Northeast TX, which historically was the Blackland Prairie region. My parents and I moved to southern Indiana since my Mother is from there. I spent the rest of my childhood growing up on a row crop and cattle farm, but realized that natural history and ecology was my passion. While in college at Murray State University studying Wildlife Biology I started working for IN DNR Div. of Nature Preserves and fell in love with the glades and barrens of southcentral IN. I stayed at MSU to acquire a masters degree in Botany. Because of my native plant and natural communities knowledge, I became a quail biologist in KY and later in TN working with private landowners desiring to restore habitat and improve their quail and other upland wildlife populations. In 2019, I got the chance to have a strictly grasslands and quail focused position through a specialized Farm Bill grant in both KY and TN. I will always strive to merge private lands work with restoration practices in degraded remnant grasslands since they are in desperate need of our recognition, care, and attention”.
Brittney Viers, QF/NRCS TN State Coordinator/Southeastern Grasslands Initiative Liaison, in a grassland remnant.
Chris Benda, Botanist and former president of the Illinois Native Plant Society will be discussing Monitoring Rare Plants of Southern Illinois (Plants of Concern program).
Chris Benda is a botanist and past president of the Illinois Native Plant Society (2015-2016). Currently, he works as a Researcher at Southern Illinois University, where he coordinates the Plants of Concern Southern Illinois Program and teaches The Flora of Southern Illinois. Besides working at SIU, he conducts botanical fieldwork around the world, teaches a variety of classes at The Morton Arboretum and leads nature tours for Camp Ondessonk. He has research appointments with the University of Illinois and Argonne National Laboratory, and is an accomplished photographer and author of several publications about natural areas in Illinois. He is also known as Illinois Botanizer and can be reached by email at botanizer@gmail.com. Visit his website at https://illinoisbotanizer.com/
Chris Benda in a native grassland showing off a rare orchid in Illinois.
Brittany White, Division of Water Wetland Biologist, will be discussing Wetland Monitoring in Kentucky.
Brittany is a wetland biologist with the Kentucky Division of Water’s Wetlands Program. After spending several years working in wetlands across the southeast, she is happy to work in Kentucky searching for salamanders, admiring soil profiles, and of course, looking at plants. Although not in her job description, she also specializes in performing terrible nature-based parodies for her coworkers. When Brit is not at work, she enjoys meandering the woods with her best mutt Evelyn, hanging out with her two kiddos, and having far too many hobbies than is reasonable.
Brittany White, Division of Water Wetland Biologist
Dr. Joey Shaw, Associate Professor @ University of Tennessee, will be presenting on the Kentucky Tennessee Plant Atlas Project.
Tara Littlefield, Botanist and Plant Conservation Section Manager at the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves and President of the Kentucky Native Plant Society, will be co-facilitating the meeting and presenting updates on on a few priority plant projects from OKNP.
Tara Littlefield is the senior botanist and manager of the Plant Conservation Section at the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. She serves on the board of the Kentucky Native Plant Society and coordinates the state’s plant conservation alliance activities-a public private partnership working on rare plant and community conservation. She grew up on the southern edge of the cedar creek glade complex in Hardin County, Kentucky and has had a fascination with the natural world since a small child. Tara has a B.S. in Biochemistry from University of Louisville and a M.S. in Forestry/Plant Ecology from the University of Kentucky. Much of her work involves rare species surveys, general floristic inventories, natural areas inventory, acquisition of natural areas, and rare plant/community restoration and recovery.
Tara Littlefield in her happy place along the river scour in the Big South Fork.
Vanessa Voelker, botanist at OKNP, will be discussing the adopt a rockshelter program and other volunteer opportunies.
Vanessa Voelker is a botanist with the Plant Conservation Section at the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. Originally from central Illinois, Vanessa worked as a lab tech for the USDA before fleeing the lab for the woods, and honed her skills as a botany technician in Missouri and Indiana before coming to Kentucky in 2020. When she isn’t in the field, Vanessa is active on iNaturalist (@vvoelker) and is always happy to help with plant identification and offer pro-tips for differentiating between tricky species
Vanessa finding a heart shaped leaf in limestone barrens.
Kendall McDonald, OKNP botanist/lichenologist will be presenting on the forest biodiversity project and lichen assessments.
Kendall McDonald is a KY native who researched lichens at Morehead State University. Since 2017, she has been a botanist and lichenologist with the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. She is the lead on OKNP’s Forest Biodiversity Assessment Program and lichen monitoring
Kendall excited to find lungwort lichen, an old growth forest indicator.
Rachel Cook will be discussing the Kentucky Native Plant Suppliers database. Rachel Cook is a botany technician with the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. Rachel is a Kentucky native, growing up on a farm in Perryville, Kentucky. She graduated from the University of Kentucky with a B.A. and a B.S. in Environmental Sciences, but botany was always her passion. As a botany technician, she helps on rare plant surveys and floristic inventories throughout the state. When not working, Rachel is tending to her house plant collection, hiking around Kentucky, or cuddling her cat.
Rachel and the state endangered small white ladyslipper.
Heidi Braunreiter will be presenting the KNPS updates and upcoming events. Heidi is a botanist and burn boss for the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. She is originally from Wisconsin and has done botanical surveys across the eastern United States. Heidi received her B.S. in Biological Aspects of Conservation and a certificate in Environmental Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2011, she met Dr. Ronald Jones on a KNPS Wildflower Weekend hike and decided to pursue a graduate degree at Eastern Kentucky University. She received her M.S. in Biology at EKU and finished her master’s thesis on A Vascular Flora of Boyle County, Kentucky.
Tony Romano will be providing an update to the states roadside pollinator habitat project. Tony is a botanist with the Plant Conservation Section at the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. He is the project coordinator for OKNP’s roadside pollinator habitat project. Originally from Illinois, Tony received a M.S. in Geography from Southern Illinois University. Tony spent several years working in land management and botany in Colorado before moving to Kentucky in 2019. When not botanizing he can be found climbing in the red river gorge and fly fishing on Elkhorn Creek.
Two of my favorite things are floating in the water and growing native plants–so building an organic swimming pool has been on my wish list for years. We finally finished the project just in time for this year’s swimming season and it is a delight!
We found a pond design that was the perfect fit for both growing native wetland plants and cooling off in the water. This pond combines a deep swimming zone (ours is 8’ deep) with an adjacent shallow planting zone.
Since our soil does not hold water, we used a liner beneath the entire area. The swimming zone is enclosed by a wooden box (ours is 10’x20’) that separates it from the planting zone. Outside of this box is the planting zone–3’ of sand and gravel that slopes towards the swimming area. The wooden box holds the substrate back from the deep area.
Our planting area surrounds the entire pool and varies in depth from 0-1.5’. Ideally you want equal areas for the planting zone and the swimming zone. A perforated pipe is beneath the sand and gravel, and a bubbler circulates water through the plant roots, into the pipe, and back to the pool. The plant roots work together with the substrate to keep the water clean and clear.
The pond is built above grade to prevent run-off from entering the pool (run-off carries nutrients from the soil into the pool and causes algae blooms). This means you have to wait for rainfall to fill the pond–luckily, we have a nearby spring we were able to use to fill the pond more quickly.
It is wonderful to finally have a wet area to plant species like soft rush, lizard’s tail, pickerelweed, rattlebox and blue flag Iris. Blue vervain, foxglove beardtongue, swamp hibiscus, fox sedge, blue lobelia and other species are thriving right at the edge of the pond where they are out of the standing water, but their roots are wet. The plants were put in the ground in May but are already doing their job to keep the water clear. (See the list of botanical names below.)
We are not the only ones enjoying the pool. Tadpoles immediately colonized the pool. It has been fun watching birds drinking from the shallow area and we have a red-eared slider who sometimes basks on a rock between swims.
Margaret Shea has a M.S. in ecology from Indiana University and has worked for a number of Kentucky Conservation organizations before starting Dropseed Native Plant Nursery 16 years ago. Margaret’s past employers include The Kentucky State Nature Preserves Commission, The Kentucky Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, and Bernheim Forest.
Wood lily (Lilium philadelphicum), Laurel County, Kentucky. @Littlefield
By Tara Littlefield, Botanist and Plant Conservation Manager
The Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves and partners have been working on a project to protect, connect, and restore populations of the state endangered wood lily (Lilium phildelphicum), and its Pine Barrens and woodland habitat over the past decade in Kentucky. The wood lily, while globally secure and wide ranging, is state endangered in Kentucky despite once being more common. This charismatic plant of the Cumberland Plateau grassland and woodlands (barrens) has declined by over 90% in the past 40 years due to habitat loss, lack of fire, mowing, and herbivory. The wood lily, along with numerous other plants it grows with, make up critical pollinator habitat for species such as the monarch butterfly and native bees. We are working with partners to bring this plant and its habitat back from the brink of extinction by coordinating and implementing monitoring, management and restoration efforts. I am excited to announce that the wood lily has finally come full circle as a plant conservation alliance project from monitoring, collaboration, seed collection, site preparation and management, to now translocation back in managed pine barrens habitat in the Cumberland plateau!
A catalyst for the creation of the Kentucky Plant Conservation Alliance
The conservation efforts for the wood lily represents a shift in plant conservation direction in our state that has happened over the past decade. Funding and targeted conservation efforts have traditionally been focused on globally rare plants, plants that are listed under the Endangered Species Act and have specific federal funding tied to their recover efforts. Since I have worked at Kentucky Nature Preserves in 2005, the lack of staff and funding has always limited the number of projects and species we could reasonably work on outside of our federally listed plant program and state nature preserves site monitoring and management programs. Our efforts for federally listed plants were successful ,and we managed with limited monitoring on our state nature preserves and associated rare species that occurred on these lands. In addition to this work, we had identified so many other plant conservation needs for state listed species across the state that were falling through the cracks due to lack of staff, funding, time outreach and education. Our rare plant records were becoming historic, and the state listed rare plants that we were able to visit on private and public lands were rapidly declining or becoming extirpated since they were originally discovered in the 70s-90s due to various threats. The wood lily is one example of a species that was falling through the cracks.
How do you tackle issue of lack of staff, time and funding to accomplish larger missions beyond the feasible efforts of just a few dedicated staff? What was our approach to addressing these serious plant conservation issues? The key is partnerships and collaboration, and creating an outreach focus of spreading the mission into other organizations and individuals.
Wood lily Conservation History
The majority of the wood lily populations were discovered and documented in the 1970s and 1980s in over 10 counties scattered in the Cumberland plateau region. They were primarily found in powerlines and roadsides and nearby pine oak woodlands and barrens. Over the years, due to habitat loss, lack of fire, summer mowing, and herbivory the populations dwindled down to just a handful of populations. I worked on a project from 2011-2013 updating roadside rare plant populations in the Cumberland plateau region on and near the Daniel Boone National Forest and collected this data. It was alarming. If trends did not change, if threats were not mitigated, we may lose one of our beautiful native lily’s, among many other rare species and habitat, from our state in the near future. With some outreach, new partnerships were formed with KYTC transportation staff and roadside maintenance crews to alter mowing and other management of the rare plant populations. We partnered with David Taylor with the Daniel Boone National Forest and Jim Scheff and Tina Johnson of Kentucky Heartwood on additional monitoring and seed collection efforts. After a failed attempt at seed collection in 2016 due to extreme herbivory, we caged 27 plants scattered in the southern Cumberland plateau region to ensure seed collection in the fall. We knew it was important to propagate and seedbank these plants as soon as possible in order to transplant future plants into suitable habitat in the future. We needed to increase the number of viable populations and make up for some of of the many lost populations over the years.
Jim Scheff of Kentucky Heartwood and Kendall McDonald of OKNP cage wood lily’s to prevent herbivory to ensure seed collection, June 2017. @ T. Littlefield
Seed was successfully collected in 2017 by OKNP, Heartwood, and KNPS volunteers and a new project with Margaret Shea of Dropseed Nursery began. Margaret is a amazing native plant horticulturalist with a rare plant conservation background. Her success at propagating the seeds, growing and safeguarding the plants until we are able to transplant into recipient pine barrens sites is crucial to the restoration and transplantation process.
Margaret Shea @ Dropseed Nursery @H. Braunreiter
At the same time, land managers at the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves, led by Josh Lillpop, began pine barrens restoration projects at on OKNP state nature preserves and natural areas in order to create more suitable pine barrens habiat for rare plants like the wood lily (Lilium phildelphicum), pine aster (Symphyotrichum concolor) and hairy snoutbean (Rhynchosia tomentosa). We partnered with staff at the Daniel Boone National Forest, including David Taylor, Claudia Cotton, Christy Wampler, and Jacob Royse who helped with population monitoring and connecting with existing pine barrens restoration efforts that could also provide future habitat for the wood lily. While our goal continued to be increasing networking with roadside and utility companies and staff on appropriate management practices for the existing rare pine barrens species, we also strived to create new populations within interior pine barrens restoration sites that are being managed with fire and mechanical removal of canopy, the pine barrens and savannah communities.
In the fall of 2021, 5 years after we began the project to protect the remaining populations and to propagate them for future introductions, the first transplantations finally began! A team from the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves and Kentucky Plant Conservation Alliance volunteers transplanted wood lily bulbs into new several sites in Powell, Pulaski and Rockcastle counties that are being managed and restored to the pine barrens woodland community.
The November 2021 wood lily bulb planting team consisted of Tara Littlefield, Heidi Braunreiter, Rachel Cook, Vanessa Voelker, Ryan Fortenberry, Lexi Schoenloab, Dale Bonk, Jim Scheff and Tina Johnson. We quickly realized that a great planting tool for these tiny wood lily bulbs were spoons, hence the spoons in some of the group photos. We planted over 500 bulbs across 5 sites with plans to expand on our plantings and sites next year. Monitoring plots were installed and data was collected. Our team will be measuring the success of these plantings over the course of the next year and networking with land managers on future scheduled burns at these sites. Fingers crossed our wood lilies survive and flourish! Stay tuned!
