I uploaded some photos of the garden taken on March 19. This is basically before anything is actually growing, but it gives a good baseline.
Lets start in the front, not much going on, however if you look close you can see little Wild Strawberries that seem to have survived under the piles of snow. There are various things that should start growing in the next couple of months. The tree is a Serviceberry, this will be its second year. We bought is as a bare root to replace a nasty Norway Maple. Underneath there is Wild Strawberry, Canada Anemone, Sneezeweed, Heart-Leaved Aster, Nodding Onion, Wild Geranium and some Cinquefoil. The Strawberry and Anemone are quite fast spreaders, so they provide most of the green. The Cinquefoils are getting overpowered. Maybe I should relocate them.
Not much going on on the other side either. There are Bloodroot, Wild Ginger, Violets, True and False Solomon's Seal, Meadowrue, Red and White Baneberry hiding in the ground. The Bloodroot should be the first thing to come out and say hello.
The side patio is pretty barren as well, in the summer this area is dry and gets fairly hot, so the plants here are more adapted for that environment. We have Prairie Smoke, Royal Catchfly, Wild Lupine (which did not do very well last year and may not return), some Goldenrods that were supposed to be New England Asters. Harebell, Tall Bellflower, some grasses, and American Groundnut vines growing up the wooden archy thing in the back of the image.
Down the stairs into the backyard, there will be cinnamon ferns on the right, Canada Mayflower in the lower right corner, on the left is a bunch of non-native something or anther that is helping retain soil (so it gets to stay, for now). Below that I have planted some more false solomon seal, a red baneberry shrub and some meadowrue. I am thinking about getting maiden hair and christmas ferns to help add some variation to the right side of the stairs. The Cinnamon Ferns were there naturally, and I just moved the to that location. They are not the prettiest of ferns.
The backyard patio. On the left of there will be Sensitive ferns. The slope on the top right has been tricky to get something established. There should be Trilliums and bunchberry, however neither seemed to do all that well last year (which is when I planted them).
This is along the back of the yard. There is a bit of a crazy mixture of stuff here. We have some shrubs, ninebark, black elderberry, maple leaf viburnum. As for plants, Asters, Wild geraniums, tall bellflowers, milkweeds (for the butterflies) Canada Anemone, Twinleaf, cardinal flower, monkey flower, may apple, jack in the pulpit. I should also mention that the backyard is where we have had the most trouble with invasives, most notably garlic mustard, celandine and lily of the valley.
From the back left corner of our property, there is a pagoda dogwood, spicebush, red osier dogwood along the right side. There is purple flowering raspberry on the inside of the corner. There is also a sprinkling of meadow rue, canada waterleaf, a few more may apples and false solomon's seal. I also planted some green headed cone flower in the corner that the picture was take from.
That's how the garden looked in Mid March, which is a few weeks back. One week after I took these photos it looked like this again:
However the snow has almost completely melted now. Hopefully that was the last of it. My most recent tour of the garden showed that the non-native spring flowers, tulips, snow drops, crokuses are starting to come up. The only activity from the natives are the red elderberry buds are starting to open:
I expect to see the spice bush, bloodroot and Virginia blue bells to start in the next few weeks. Exciting times in the native garden.