Hepaticas bloom in early spring about the same time as our trout lilies.  They self seed freely in our yard, but I also collect seed from the most colorful plants and sow it where I would like plants.  The plants growing naturally in our woods are mostly white-flowered, but occasionally I come across one with blue flowers.  At the time of this writing, the plant at the left is called Hepatica acutiloba, but hang on;  taxonomists have been changing Hepatica names frequently.  The species name derives from the pointed shape of the leaves as shown in the photo immediately below that at left.  My friend Sylvia in the Twin Cities gave me a blue flowered H. acutiloba, and now all the many dozens of plants in my yard including these two at left are descended from it. At right is a blue-flowered Hepatica americana grown from seed my friend Dan in Virginia sent me.  It has pleasingly patterned leaves, but the old leaves don't show here and the new ones have yet to emerge.  These leaves have rounded tips distinguishing them from H. acutiloba.  All the wild plants on my land are H. americana.
	Last year's leaves of the H. acutiloba at left have survived the winter here in particularly good condition and show the pointed tips well.  All too often here, bitter cold arrives in the fall before sufficient snow to protect the leaves, and they get freeze dried.  This doesn't kill the plant but does deprive it of energy for good growth the next season. At right is my pride and joy among Hepaticas: a pink-flowered H. americana that I grew from seed collected from a pink-flowered plant along a back road about five miles north of my house.  Most of the wild Hepaticas in my area have white flowers;  blue-flowered ones are scarce, and pink ones are downright rare.  Note the rounded leaf tips.

By May 20, as the hepatica blooming season was winding down, floral activity under the bur oak grove in our yard was really picking up.  If you look closely at this photo of a patch of ground under the oaks you can pick out bloodroot, spring beauty, Dutchman's breeches, large bellwort, and large flowered trillium not yet in bloom.  Most of the upland part of our land that hasn't been modified by agriculture or house construction has soil consisting of 2"-4" of humus-rich, woodsy loam, underlain by the dense clay that is characteristic of the glacial till covering most of the local landscape.  This small grove of bur oaks has some of my best soil.

Alas, few of my Claytonia virginica, spring beauty, are so colorful as this one.  The majority are a pale pink or even white.  I purchased a few plants from Prairie Restorations well over a decade ago, but now I have a great many plants from a combination of my scattering seed collected from wild populations or from self seeding of existing plants.  There are several patches in different areas of the yard.  Across the Swan River west of my house there is a small natural population on county land with a few clumps on the floodplain of the river , but I seldom visit these plants because of the difficult access across the river.  I found one spectacular spring beauty population in Aitkin County, the next county south of me, as I was driving by it at high speed on the highway.  From the car I noticed that the whole floor of the woods was pink and had to go back on foot for a second look.

To my mind Uvularia grandiflora, the large-flowered bellwort also known as merrybells, is one of our most graceful and elegant wildflowers.  The species is fairly common in my part of northern Minnesota, and a few individuals were making a natural comeback in former cow pasture in the most remote corner of my property.  To establish plants in the yard, however, I have buried seeds where I wanted plants.  The seeds should be collected from the mother plant as soon as they are ripe and immediately buried under a half inch of soil.  If the soil remains moist the rest of the summer and the next season, leaves should emerge above ground the second spring after planting.

While there are herbarium specimens from Itasca County, where I live, I have never found Dicentra cucullaria, Dutchman's breeches, here;  I have seen populations in two adjacent counties: Aitkin and Cass.  The plant is reportedly toxic, but that doesn't stop deer from nibbling the foliage in early spring.  Such predation decreases as the spring progresses, perhaps either because the plants may accumulate a greater concentration of toxic compounds with age or because the deer increasingly have more palatable options available.  D. cucullaria grows in several areas of my yard but clearly flourishes and spreads best in the rich soil under my little bur oak grove.  I have repeatedly tried establishing plants in what appears to me to be excellent habitat in a patch of moist woods east of our barn, but these plants inevitably decline over two or three years or sometimes disappear abruptly even when encircled with a cylinder of hardware cloth to prevent deer predation.  The damp habitat there fosters a large slug population, so perhaps slug predation is eliminating the plants, or there may be some entirely different threat that I have not yet even imagined.  In any case this is a great example of a principle that good gardeners know, namely, that if a plant appears to be unhappy at one location, move it to another.

By the end of May the floral display in the deciduous woods here has reached a peak with such species as woodland phlox, Phlox divaricata, and the larger trilliums in full bloom.  Woodland phlox self seeds here, and all I have to do to start a new patch is to replant the volunteers where I want them.  There is also a Virginia bluebells in this photo almost camouflaged among the phlox.

I suppose Trillium grandiflorum is most people's favorite trillium.  It has a very wide range including northern Minnesota, and I live just along the northern edge of that range.  The plant does very well in many areas of my yard.  I collect much of the seed and sow it in spots where I would like more plants, but as you can see from the little pointed cotyledons around the base of the clump in this photo, I clearly don't manage to collect all the seed and neither do the ants that help disperse trillium seed in nature.  The clump in this photo started as a volunteer seedling that I moved to this spot and is now some 20 years old.  There are many places in Minnesota including several state parks where large-flowered trillium carpets vast expanses of forest floor.  While such displays are beautiful, I don't think I want that here as smaller wildflowers can't get established under the dense cover of trillium leaves.

The flowers of large-flowered trillium normally open white and then turn pink as the blooms age.  Trillium grandiflorum forma roseum flowers, however, open pink.  This beautiful form is extremely rare throughout most of the range of the species, but is frequent in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.  My Virginia friend Dan, who lives near the Blue Ridge, generously sent me three plants including this one from his yard.   I love this beautiful form, and I'm delighted to have a good crop of seedlings from it coming along;  I'm hopeful a few will bloom in the next year or two and come true with this color.

While not so glamorous as some of our trilliums, Trillium flexipes or drooping trillium makes up for that lack with its impressive size, sometimes 20" high or more.  In this photo notice how the plant dwarfs Trillium grandiflorum in the background.  T. flexipes is native to Minnesota, but not this far north.  Other plants in the photo include Viola pubescens, bloodroot, and lady fern.