In the shade of deep woods, they tend to be smaller, slenderer and more open in habit than in sun. Preferring moist, well-drained soil, they tolerate the typical summer dryness of my woods where the available moisture is sucked up by trees. They do not transplant easily, according to Dirr. He says this is because of the coarsely fibrous root system. Well, I have pulled and dug many of these plants and have not found a fibrous root system on any of them.
Larger plants have two or three big main roots that spread far.
If you can sever them, you can remove the stump. If you cut the stems off at ground level, they will re-sprout for years. They are not really fast growing plants, but sprouting stumps will put up a couple feet of growth in a season. Flowering occurs in very early spring - March in my USDA zone 7 garden. Actually, it never really dawned on me that the early greening I saw on these plants were flowers .