Thank you all for the IDs!! I think you are right about #3-5. I wasn't sure about the Curly Dock from pics on the web, but you seem pretty sure about that Toad. I will wait and see if it sends up the flower stalks. Apparently it is an edible and tasty green? #2 is probably a hawkweed (Heiracium), although I haven't yet found a particular species that matches it well.

Katy-did, You can dig and weed around native plants as long as you don't get TOO close. If a plant is kept in place, you could dig a weed as close as the outer edges of the leaves without damaging the roots too much. You could add woodland wildflowers in spots that currently have lawn grasses or weeds. You probably will find some weeds like dandelions, plantain, and other lawn weeds. You could dig these up and put new wildflowers instead. If there is not too much lawn grass to remove, then it could be done with small tools (hand trowel, etc) close to existing wildflowers. Larger areas could be turned over with a shovel. If you want to convert areas that don't have many wildflowers you can simply cover the grass and weeds with lots of fall leaves. The leaves will smother most of the grass and decay to enrich the soil and make it more like a woodland soil, which will help encourage woodland wildflowers. If you have an area with only a few wildflowers, you could move the wildflowers then either turn over the grass with a shovel then mulch with leaves, or simply mulch with leaves and wait. To move a wildflower dig up a piece of the ground with the wildflower in it and move it intact to a new location. I use a standard garden shovel to move a piece of ground about a foot in diameter at the surface and about a foot or s15 inches deep. This works for most large wildlfowers. For really small ones you could move a smaller piece of earth. If you keep the ground intact and therefore preserve the contact between the roots and the soil you should be able to move most wildflowers. Try to avoid separating the roots from the soil - there are many very small roots and even smaller strands of fungus that connect a root to the soil which are destroyed if a plant is moved bare root. Some plants will recover, but some may not so it is best to keep the soil and the plant together. Place the wildflower and soil in the ground so that the surface of the soil matches the surface in the new location, and carefully fill cracks around the edges of the soil ball with more soil.

Prairie Moon is a great nursery. I also LOVE the similarly named Prairie Nursery since they sell healthy, seed grown plants in small (3") easy to plant pots. Plant Delights, Arrowhead Alpines and Munchkin Nursery all have a wide selection of nursery propagated trilliums. Sunlight Gardens is a wonderful source of native wildflowers as well.

I only have experience with trilliums.... They grow well around here. There were a few already here when we bought this property in 1999 but we're added to them since. What has worked for us is to plant them dormant in mid summer, plant them in areas with lots of leaf litter - under trees, and never water or disturb them while they are dormant! There are lots of squirrels here and, as far as I can tell, they've never bothered them. The white trilliums are more vigorous for us than red ones - white ones are the provincial flower of Ontario so that might be a sign that they are particularly suited here. They are now spreading by both offsets and seedlings. Some pictures....: Cole in the nearby 'trillium wood' that is my reference for what I'd like to have here! White trilliums near the shed in our garden: A closer view from 2015 where you can see seedlings getting big enough to start to bloom: (Note the plentiful oak leaves in those pictures! The trilliums seem to like those conditions....) Red trilliums don't seem as happy here and are spreading much slower: On the issue of squirrels and tulips.... Here the squirrels seem inclined to ADD tulips to our garden! Several years after we started gardening here, a clump of orange tulips appeared under the oak tree in the back yard. We didn't plant them and the tulips looked suspiciously like ones in a neighbour's yard down the street! :-) So we assume the squirrels planted them..... Aside from deadheading the tulips once the flowers fade, I do nothing to them - they keep returning and the clump gets bigger as the years pass. The oldest picture I can find on this computer is 2010 but I think they first appeared before that. 2010: 2015 (apologies for the poor picture quality!) Some salmony-pink tulips appeared in the front garden 2-3 years ago that I was sure we didn't plant and, looking around, I saw the same ones in a garden across the street! So squirrels might dig up the occasional bulb, but they are probably gifting it to a neighbour :-)