Since early spring, a certain bratty-looking leafy plant has been popping up all over my yard. All over it. Up through monkey grass, up through hydrangeas, around the roses, out in the middle of the yard where it has no neighbors, along the driveway, hugging concrete, around the bird bath, peeking through the slits in the fence from my neighbor’s side, everywhere.
At first I mistook it for some kind of volunteer tree, until I noticed it coming up along the back bedroom wall, up through the red rose bush, clinging for dear life to the bricks with tiny sticky tendrils. “Maw,” I drawled to myself. “That ain’t no tree.”
The internet was kind enough to look at my various pictures and pleas for identification and it was Naomi Van Tol of Citizens to Preserve Overton Park who first floated the name that now sends chills up and down my spine: trumpet creeper vine. 
Sure enough, my other gardeny friends began to corroborate this assertion. And several feverishly paced Google searches and scanned links later, I realized I had a monster on my hands.
This sumbitch is also called “cow itch” — which is just about as ungraceful a name as a plant can have. I don’t appear to be allergic because I have not felt any rashy action after handling my fair share of it. I have been pulling it up as best I can, but it seems to be nothing one day and then two feet tall the next. I pull at it, but the roots go so deep that most of the time the stalk just snaps and I have to make a mental note to come dig up the root. And I don’t mean down a couple of inches. I’m talking thick roots that shoot down a foot or more and want to fight you. Of course, this stuff is popping up in beds where I really don’t want to be digging with a shovel, so it complicates matters substantially.
I’ve been reading tales of the brave folks who have wrestled with this pest and and cringing at the minimum maintenance that is going to be required of me just to keep the thing from taking over, much less kill it dead. But I’m also in mourning a little bit.
And that’s because my trumpet creeper, I finally realized, is coming from the ancient woody bits that are entangled in my metal fence out back. The woody bits I have been so charmed by, because they are so old they have become a part of the fence.
Well, they probably have. And it’s because you can’t fucking kill a trumpet vine.
So I really have to decide if I’m willing to completely destroy my fence and the most established of the back flowerbeds in order to get rid of the mother vine and her sprawling roots in order to have some hope of stamping out the rest. Because as long as those bits are here and sprouting new growth and seeding, and as long as those roots are worming their way through the yard (and they are, oh god, they are), I am never going to be free from the constant maintenance of this pest. I know this vine will eventually have really pretty blooms and attract hummingbirds if I let it take over so that its boughs can hang, but it can also destroy roofs and siding and sidewalks. Soooooo I will stick to sugar water for the hummers, thanks.
http://www.ppws.vt.edu/scott/weed_id/cmira.htm