THE PLANTS OF WINNESHIEK COUNTY. 147 
” 
THE PLANIS OF WINNESHIEK COUNTY. 
; 
BY B. SHIMEK. 
Winneshiek county presents a flora of unusual richness. Both 
because of its geographic position and its varied surface features 
it offers conditions which have made possible the development 
of a variety of plants scarcely equalled in any other county of 
the state. Its northerly position and its rough topography, 
especially along the Upper Iowa or Oneota river have brought 
a northerly flora, such as belongs to the heavily wooded regions 
of Minnesota and Wisconsin; its wooded knobs and ridges along 
the Turkey and the head waters of the Yellow rivers remind one 
of the rough wooded areas of southern Iowa; while the prairies 
are but a continuation of the greater prairies of the west. Each 
of these territories presents a variety of conditions. The 
roughest includes the driftless area and the drift border, with 
their deep gorges with narrow alluvial bottoms, their exposures 
of both sandstones and limestones, their shaded mossy banks 
and wooded slopes with not infrequent small bogs, and their 
drier wooded ridges with occasional treeless barren summits ; the 
more southerly timbered ridges present somewhat similar con- 
ditions, but without the prominent rock-exposures, and with 
floral areas less sharply defined than those which characterize a 
region cut by deep gorges; and the treeless areas include both 
the rich level prairie and the prairie bogs of the Iowan drift, and 
the more rolling and drier prairie of the Kansan. The soils are 
derived chiefly from loess and drift (which are discussed. else- 
where in this report), and therefore vary comparatively little in 
chemical ‘composition. Occasionally coarser, sandy material 
appears on tke ridges, but on the whole a finer soil prevails, 
