a while as cultivated fields, and later abandoned. 
The narrow road that once traversed the valley from 
its head to its mouth has also been abandoned. The 
forest of the ravine floor is rich in plant species. 
Trees of this forest include sycamore, hard maple, 
tulip tree, beech, butternut, white ash, and hackberry. 
Some of the understory trees and shmbs are blue 
beech, wild hydrangea, elderberry, bladdernut, and 
spicebush. The ravine floor is a place of beauty in 
the spring when it is carpeted with numerous patches 
of colorful wild flowers. By autumn the forest floor is 
no longer a carpet of color, but here and there are 
asters, goldenrods, and white snakeroot. Among the 
plants of the forest floor are such ferns as the broad 
beech, Christmas, and grape. 
Ravine slopes support vegetations that range from 
the xeric to the mesic. The driest slopes maintain a 
forest of black oak, northern red oak, shagbark hick- 
ory, and other species. Poverty grass, various moss- 
es, and lichens are abundant on the dry soil. The 
moist ravine slopes sustain a forest of beech, hard 
maple, hop hornbeam, redbud, flowering dogwood, and 
other arborescent species. Beech-drops, Christmas 
fern, wild hydrangea, and arrowwood, as well as num- 
erous mosses, grow on these slopes. In one locality, 
at the summit of a sandstone cliff, sphagnum moss is 
abundant. In another locality, the walking fern, hepat- 
ica, and asters grow together in patches of moss on 
large sandstone blocks that lie above the floodwaters 
of the creek. 
The sandstone cliffs possess a flora of mosses 
and liverworts; Conocephalum conicum is the common 
species. In the recesses, wild hydrangea and several 
species of asters and goldenrods, as well as the maid- 
enhair fern, find places in which they can live. Part- 
ridge berry is not uncommon at the tops of the cliffs 
and it grows elsewhere with mosses. Lady fern 
thrives in some places at the cliff bases. 
The upland woods is one of oaks and hickories. 
The forest is dry, and the floor supports mosses, 
lichens, poverty grass, and other xeric species. Nod- 
ding ladies’-tresses, which blooms as late as mid- 
October, grows in the open parts of the upland woods. 
The abandoned fields maintain a mixture of herbs 
and varying numbers of trees and shrubs scattered 
here and there. In a field abandoned in 1958, one of 
the few woody plants observed in 1961 was the black- 
berry. In older fields, smooth sumac, black walnut, 
tulip tree, northern red oak, and American elm have 
become established and perhaps are the beginnings 
of a deciduous forest that eventually will dominate 
the fields. 
Rocky Branch is of interest botanically because 
it lies in the westernmost limit of beech, black gum, 
and tulip tree in central Illinois. In addition, several 
species of orchids grow here. According to Stover 
(1930), the ground pine Lycopodium lucidulum throve 
on the sandstone. Irresponsible collectors and van- 
dals have destroyed all traces of the club moss at 
Rocky Branch. The absence of sizable forest trees 
indicates that the original forest was felled at some 
earlier date. 
Rocky Branch is in private ownership except for 
135 acres that the Nature Conservancy has recently 
purchased and has designated as a natural area. It 
has served as an outdoor laboratory for students of 
botany and zoology at Eastern Illinois University for 
more than 30 years. 
11. AN ILLINOIS CENTRAL RAILROAD PRAIRIE 
A little over a century ago, much of east-central 
Illinois was flatland prairie. Although early settlers 
shunned the land as being unsuitable for cultivation 
because of a belief that only forest soils were fertile, 
later ones found it was extremely productive and 
Fig. 18.— Prairie remnant in railroad trackway near 
Watseka, Iroquois County. Such remnants are all that remain 
of a once great expanse of flatland prairie. 
valued it highly. After a suitable plow had been per- 
fected to break and turn the prairie sod and afterdrain 
tile had been placed to lower the water level, vast 
stretches of prairie were converted to farmland. Now 
only remnants of prairie are left; they are along road- 
sides or railroad trackways. These remnants, fig. 18, 
must be preserved if we wish any Illinois flatland 
prairie vegetation to remain for future generations to 
study and enjoy. 
A prairie area located along the trackway of the 
Illinois Central Railroad between Laclede, Fayette 
County, and Alma, Marion County, is actually a series 
of remnants of the Twelve-Mile Prairie of south-cen- 
tral Illinois. Numerous stretches of this trackway 
have been plowed for production of farm crops or of 
nursery stock. Some stretches that were cultivated 
have been abandoned and have reverted to a prairie 
type of vegetation. 
The area is relatively flat except for those places 
where small streams have eroded into the flatlands. 
A century ago the drainage was poor, and the flac 
lands between the streams were very wet except in 
late summer, the dry season. At that season giant 
cracks appeared in the clay soil. Today numerous 
ditches along the railroad and highway drain the land 
15 
