Transplanting can take place pretty much at any time in your climate. I wouldn't recommend division - most shrubs, even caning shrubs and more specifically evergreen shrubs, dislike it and it can put it into shock. You could easily lose both the mother plant and any divisions. Propagation is most easily accomplished by stem cuttings. That's the method most growers use, outside of microculture. Root pruning, which may be appropriate at transplant time, can also generate root cuttings from the rhizomatous shoots. This is quite a bit different from division though, as you are only removing the exterior shoots, not disrupting the entire root mass.

I've grown in in pots, and in the ground inside a greenhouse. You can get it to bloom in a container, but the blooms will be smaller, UNLESS, you are planning on growing it in a huge, deeper tub, like 35+ gallons, where it will really simulate being in the ground. I have had several different cultivars bloom in pots, but like Steve said, pitiful in comparison to what you get in the ground. I grew the red, the pink (Eileen McDonald) and the variegated flower Polynesian Princess for several years, planted in the ground inside my greenhouse. The stands get absolutely huge. The red is by far the largest in stature, individual stalks can reach 8+ feet and the inflos can be almost a foot long. The pink is smaller but not by much. The stands in the ground have a lot of 'lean out' and large diameter stalks so they are very hoggish of space. They take up a lot of room. And its true, they attract scale and mealybugs bigtime in an enclosed environment. My greenhouse is large (over 1700 sq ft) so I had the room, but after a while, I just put Alpinia purpurata in the 'been there done that' category of tropical gingers, and I dug them out and planted them into the ground here in 8B, where they were absolutely beautiful for one season, then were killed by frost.

It is Stromanthe Sanguinea "Triostar". It is listed as hardy to zone 9b but I've been growing this plant outdoors for years. It's almost croaked a few times from a nasty 22 degrees freeze that we had two winters in a row a few years back. It likes shade. It needs water on a regular basis even if planted in the ground. Steve

SweetMonkey, It's not that I don't love the gingers and the heliconias, they are too beautiful to give up fully but I have also turned into a lazy gardener. I only keep the heliconias and gingers in pots cause I want low maintenance lol. As long as you put everything in the right place and you are happy with the way it looks, then you are all set! The dwarf button ginger will make a fast, lush clump and is beautiful. Other people think the white BOP is too much but I love it and don't find it too much to keep up with. My style is tropical and neat but not meticulous. I aspire to a tropical - Japanese garden one day. That's the thing, it's all dependent on where you put it and what makes YOU happy in the garden.