April 8 – 16, First Day Hikes, BotanyBlitz, & Wildflower Weekend
In less than 2 months, the Kentucky Native Plant Society’s Wildflower Week 2023 will begin!
Join with other nature lovers, families, community scientists, amateur naturalists, and professional botanists, from across the Commonwealth, as we explore the beauty and diversity of Kentucky’s native plant communities in April.
We are excited to be making some big changes this year: while our friends at Natural Bridge SRP have hosted Wildflower Weekend for over 30 years, we want to give parks across the state the opportunity to show off their unique ecology and geology, as well as their spring flora. To accomplish this, we plan to alternate Wildflower Weekend locations between Natural Bridge SRP in even-numbered years, and other Kentucky parks in odd-numbered years. For Wildflower Weekend 2023 (April 14th-16th) we’re delighted to be meeting at beautiful Cumberland Falls SRP & the Big South Fork National River & Recreation Area.
But our celebration isn’t just limited to Wildflower Weekend itself — continuing our new tradition, we will be holding a week-long BotanyBlitz (April 8-15) hosted on iNaturalist. To help us kick off the BotanyBlitz, we will host a number of BotanyBlitz First Day Hikes in natural areas across the Commonwealth. The First Day Hikes and the BotanyBlitz will be opportunities to broaden our spring wildflower scope to the entire state of Kentucky and allow us to highlight natural areas across the state!
Details are still being worked out, but we anticipate opening up registration to all of the events in early March. Kentucky Native Plant Society members will be given the first opportunity to register for the events, before they are opened up to the general public.
We have also created a page for Wildflower Week 2023, where the latest information will be posted as it is developed. Please visit and bookmark.
BotanyBlitz 2023
Leading up to Wildflower Weekend will be our third annual, week-long BotanyBlitz, which will run from Saturday, April 8, through Saturday, April 15, and will be hosted on the iNaturalist website. A BotanyBlitz is a community-science event that focuses on finding and identifying as many plant species as possible within a designated location and time period. To join in the fun, please log in or sign up for an iNaturalist account, then head to the BotanyBlitz project page and click “Join” in the top right corner.
Commencing on Saturday, April 8, and continuing all week, we are encouraging everyone to visit parks and natural areas throughout the Commonwealth, to find and photograph native plants (with an emphasis on those in bloom) and upload them to iNat. If you’re not sure how to identify a plant you see, you can use iNat’s excellent mobile app to suggest identifications based on your photos, and iNat’s community of expert botanists and naturalists can add comments to your “digital specimens” to confirm or help correct the ID.
BotanyBlitz 2023 First Day Hikes
To kick off 2023’s BotanyBlitz, on Saturday, April 8 we will host a series of First Day Hikes in parks and natural areas across the Commonwealth. These easy nature walks will be led by local botanizers and iNat users who are familiar with the local native flora you’ll encounter. Don’t forget to make sure you’ve joined the BotanyBlitz iNat project before embarking on the hike! And if you’re new to iNaturalist, we recommend signing up for an account, then joining our BotanyBlitz project, and downloading the iNaturalist mobile app in advance of the hike to give yourself time to “test drive” the app. You can check out these video tutorials to get started!
Although the First Day Hikes are intended to give the BotanyBlitz a strong start, you do not need to be an iNat user to sign up for these hikes — all wildflower enthusiasts are welcome to join in!
Wildflower Weekend 2023
The culmination of Wildflower Week will be our 34th annual Wildflower Weekend, scheduled for April 14, 15, & 16. The weekend will offer wildflower hikes Friday afternoon and all day Saturday, led by some of the best botanists in the state. These hikes will explore the region’s rich natural heritage and resources in Cumberland State Resort Park and the Big South Fork Recreation Area. Friday evening there will be a campfire social gathering to meet your fellow native plant enthusiasts. On Saturday night we will have a KNPS member meeting (the general public is welcome), several botanically oriented talks, and a native plant raffle.
This event is open to the public and kid-friendly. Admission is $10 for adults, $3 for ages 13-17, and free for ages 12 & under.
In June of 2022, a KNPS member posted an image on the KNPS Facebook group page of an old Wildflower Weekend t-shirt she had found in a thrift store. Asking among several longtime members, it turns out that in the 1990s, and into the early 2000’s, KNPS produced t-shirts for each Wildflower Weekend. This was such a fun idea, we have decided to bring back this great tradition. We wanted the design to be similar to the 1991 shirt, with native plant species as the central element. We also wanted to use species that would likely be flowering (or showing attractive foliage) in mid-April, in the area around Cumberland Falls. We surveyed the KNPS membership to find out which wildflower the community wanted to see on a t-shirt, and the winning species was the lovely American Trout Lily (Erythronium americanum).
Many thanks to the artistic talents of KNPS member Kendall MacDonald for creating this gorgeous illustration for our 2023 Wildflower Weekend! This beautiful image will be featured on an adult t-shirt, a coffee mug, a kid’s t-shirt, and an adult hoodie and all will be available for sale on our KNPS Gear Shop when event registration begins in early March.
Kendall McDonald, Wildflower Weekend Logo Designer
Kendall McDonald is an artist, botanist and lichenologist that grew up in Owen County, Kentucky. She developed a love for art and nature at a young age, and carried that with her into her education and career. After getting her bachelors degree in biology at Morehead State University, she started at the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves as a heritage botanist and lichenologist. For the last 5 years, she has been an active member of the Kentucky Native Plant Society as a member of planning committees and a co-editor for the Lady Slipper newsletter. Her passion for biodiversity permeates her art, as her collection mostly consists of paintings of Kentucky native species and landscapes. She combined her love of spring ephemerals and wonderful Kentucky landscapes to create the design for the t-shirt and stickers for Wildflower Weekend 2023! The design is a close up of the gorgeous native Yellow Trout Lily (Erythronium americanum) over a background of Cumberland Falls.