This plant is the manifestation of two crimes–the crime of a mail order nursery catalog that told me how wonderful and fragrant this plant is; and the second crime, my inability to identify this as a shrub, not a vine, and as a thug, not a prize. I had two twigs originally that came in the mail and that I planted and grew on.
And grow they did. One of them was against the back fence because I assumed it would vine delicately and have hummingbird beloved blooms. Instead, it became this bushy shrub that had to be hacked back heavily every year. I finally removed that one. But the twig I stuck in the corner of the orchard garden still survives to this day. It has some good garden attributes, like how easy it is, attractive but plain foliage, and floriferous with mediocre pink flowers.
I made commitments lately to add native plants and to remove invasives, so this shrub, which is invasive in most of the US, needs to go. My 2020 plans for this shrub are to kill it, which is sad on some level, but necessary on all the other levels. I will replace it with a wonderful native shrub–a salmon berry or elderberry or something like that.
