Backyard woodland garden in springtime

About 25 years ago when we arrived in Wisconsin, this wooded area behind the house was wall-to-wall buckthorn and honeysuckle.  I spent two summers grubbing those out, and within a year or two the native plants began to appear, presumably from dormant seeds that were being shaded out and starved of water by the invasives.  Jack-in-the-pulpits began popping up, along with native violets and other spring ephemerals.  I added some cinnamon fern, which loved the thick leaf litter.

We planted a few white trillium, which went on to form clusters and then metastasized to distant parts of the woods.

Red trillium are doing the same, and also the yellow trillium (here popping up in a bed of Lilies of the Valley).

For dramatic color in a woodland setting, nothing beats bleeding hearts (Dicentra), but TBH I have never seen the native bees or the bumblebees visiting these introduced flowers. The bluebells next to them get visited, but AFAIK not the bleeding hearts.

The champion of the woodland garden in the opinion of the pollinators is the vinca, which has spread as a groundcover to such an extent that I need to restrain it by pulling it out at the perimeters I want.

One other favorite of the bees is the wild ginger, which multiplies and spreads readily.  The blossoms are net to the ground and not visible to casual human visitors unless you pull back the overlying leaves.  But the bumblebees find them - and perhaps other insects as well.

For beautiful foliage, my overall favorite is the pulmonaria - so named because the leaves were once thought to resemble diseased lungs (and that is not a bad analogy, to be honest).  The flowers (not captured in this photo) are small and delicate and are visited by bees, but I like the plant for the foliage, which dramatically adds patterns to the woodland floor.