Bless your heart Tammy. Maybe a four pack of your sweet hellebores too. I got a four pack from you the first swap I went to. I planted them in a kind of dry, sandy garden and forgot about them. Every once in a while I would look at all those little plants with two little cast iron leaves and think humm what the heck are those and then laugh when I remembered where they came from. Can't tell you how pleased I was last week when I looked one morning and bright, new green leaves were coming from each of them. Took them two years. I have to continually remind myself to be patient. Maybe that's the lesson I am supposed to learn ha. I have an extremely hard head. Adele

Treat them as rooted cuttings, which they obviously are. I used to buy them that way and grow them into blooming, saleable size, which for most, was 2 years. Occasionally, would receive a cultivar that took it's sweet old time growing up, but that was an exception. Don't oversize the pot, that tends to retain too much moisture. Better to water more frequently than have a dead waterlogged plant. Use a mix that remains moist, but is well drained. I use sand. perlite, pine bark fines and sometimes chert to mix with a mostly sphagnum peat potting mix. Protect from sun and wind for the first year. After they stabilize in their new surroundings, which often takes only a couple of weeks, I begin fertilization with a water soluble 15-30-15 application, full strength,once a week. Be sure to water before applying fertilizer to avoid burning the roots. This is continued foe 3-4 weeks. The following year, I repot to a full gallon container about March and many will produce a few blooms that season. I have a number that were rooted last year that now have one or two fresh blooms. If a mac only produces a single tall cane during the first year(rare, but does happen), I cut it back to sbout 1 ft. after blooming and usually will have multiple canes the second year. That is the only pruning I do, except to take cuttings for propagation. That doesn't apply to the unruly paniculata's! Rb

I've had a mole working on mine, he just tunnels right through the roots and stem and you all you have is the top of the plant left.... And he's so deep in my nicely tilled new raised bed i have'nt been able to see him working enough to blow his little rear end right of his hole with my shotgun..lol

I don't know at all, but as a teacher of plant ID I can tell you those two photos are of two different plants. What either of them is, I couldn't tell you. The "margins" (outer edge) of the leaves are different, the one at the top has smooth margins, and the photo at the bottom has margins that are serrated, like a saw. Also the veins are different. In the photo at the bottom the veins are very straight and parallel. In the top photo, not so much, and much less distinct. The problem with the word "amaranth" is it is kind of like "cress" as it describes a whole family of plants. For example, celosia, which is a garden flower, and the weed "pigweed" and the food plant amaranth are in the same family but they are different species. Beets and spinach are also in that "family" although the name has changed so it's not actually called the amaranth family anymore. So from a botany point of view, spinich is also an "amaranth." And to further confuse things, amaranth is also the name of a genus, which is a smaller subgroup of plants than a family. Botanists are really crazy people with too much time on their hands, IMHO. Below is a link to Wikepedia's entry on edible "amaranth" which has a lot of good info on the edible varieties. Apparently there are different edible varieties eaten in different parts of the world. Sounds like something very healthful! Here is a link that might be useful: Amaranth