Plants are incapable of self-pollination and because the vegetatively produced clones spread out, it is difficult to exactly estimate the number of true individuals in a population.

The short, firm cauline leaves are subsessile or obscurely petiolated with narrowly elliptic to lanceolate blades, with three nerves and distally serrate margins.

[5][7] Ideal areas include pastures, rock ledges, limestone and cedar glades, and openings in woods and forests such as those created by power line rights-of-way.

[6] Ideal growing conditions exist in populations of more than 300 healthy plants spread over 10 or more acres with buffering vegetation for at least 1.6 km (0.99 mi).

[2] Significant areas of potential habitat for the plant were destroyed in the 1970s by construction of a new campground at Blue Licks Battlefield State Park.

[7] It was named for Dr. Charles Wilkins Short of Louisville, Kentucky, who discovered it growing on a limestone outcrop known as Rock Island in the Falls of the Ohio in 1840.

It was last collected from that location in 1860, but might have continued to grow there had it not been for the alteration of the island effected by the construction of McAlpine Locks and Dam on the falls in the early 1900s.

Six years later, three of those ecologists discovered a wild population of the plant while conducting a botanical inventory of the Blue River watershed in Indiana.

[13] Prior to this, there were only five known natural populations of the plant; all were near the junction of Robertson, Nicholas, and Fleming counties in Kentucky, within a 2-mile (3.2 km) radius of Blue Licks Battlefield State Park.