Please keep us posted on how you do with the lesser celandine. That is one of my problem weeds and I'm always looking for ideas.

I quite like the lesser celandine, although I grew the fancy leaved forms (which would often revert to the straight green species). They would often take over my woodland shade area in spring then disappear. They never seemed to overwhelm anything - certainly not my hellebores - and were relatively easy to remove where not wanted. Wish I could say the same for their cousin, the creeping buttercup, Ranunculus repens......now THAT one's the pernicious weed in my garden!! I get the impression that the hellebores may be relatively new - once they become well-established clumps with some size to them, I doubt you will need to worry about the celandine overwhelming them, just as flora indicates :-)

I don't think I will ever be able to get rid of mine. I can spray on the paths, but it has invaded alot of perennial areas. The only way I have been able to keep it from totally taking over everyhing is to pull it and make sure I get those nasty little tubers. However...the good news is...it's gone by June.

Here's a super random question: might the tubers be poisonous to ducks ? I'm not sure if I just discovered a brilliant way to get rid of lesser celandine, OR accidentally kill mallard ducks, OR if it doesn't kill them, might I be inadvertently causing the LC to spread via the ducks digestive track not "composting" them properly... I just put a big pile of LCelandine into a hole I dug in the center of my compost heap and before I got around to covering it up to let the heat digest them into oblivion, there were 2 Mallard Ducks pecking away at the pile. I don't know if it was a coincidence that there was something else mixed in with the tubers & greens that they were noshing on or if it was the tubers themselves. I know it's a shot in the dark, but any thoughts? Should I cover the heap? Or let them continue to go at it?