Leave the leaves. They will both enrich the soil and help reduce the chance that garlic mustard seeds will sprout. Also they keep the area moist, allowing you to pull any seedlings more easily.

Good luck - sounds like a promising effort.

I have a small woods with wildflowers also; I generally take off the top layer of leaves so the wildflowers can come through. We have a lot of oaks and they don't just deteriorate over the winter, and the leaves can make a heavy mat that covers up my little wild babies.

(Note: I only take off enough to keep from smothering the plants, and I do it with my fingers, gently to keep from pulling out or decapitating the desirable wildflowers. I do leave a good layer of leaves under the plants).

Some of the larger plants like ferns, solomon's seal, trilliums and ginger will come up through the leaves and cover them up with their foliage, but the bloodroots, harbinger of spring, anemones, and smaller things have a hard time.

If I don't do that, sometimes the spring ephemeral wildflowers will come up, bloom and be gone before I even know they are there.

I have a lot of moss on the paths also, and if I don't take the leaves off of it, it will be killed by layers of wet leaves.

In my area, heavy mats of maple leaves are more of a problem than mats of oak. But we have a lot of freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw, and I find that clearing the leaf mats early in the spring works better here.

As the snowdrops start coming up, I just loosen the leaf mats a little over things that will be up soon. And leave the 'blankets' on the rest. When the snow pretty much melts back, I clear the leaf mats. And then I may leave some loosened leaves over some of the tenderest things.... But I generally do this is in early spring.