the devil bush

Today I put in a good 5 hours of hard labor. Don’t let anyone tell you unemployment is relaxing. I planted my main vegetable garden yesterday, three rows of corn, zucchini, peppers, celery, tomatoes, strawberries, and cucumbers.
Now, with today came the hard part. I need more sunny space. I still have loads of plants that need a home in the ground and no sunny areas to put them in. This is tough to understand, because my yard is HUGE. But it's so overgrown and has so many ridiculously placed trees that there is very little square footage that receives 6 hours of light per day. I identified some space in the front that I could make into something resembling a garden. This is it:
At first glance, this seems like an unassuming pile of shrubbery. It is actually on top of a mound of dirt, so it’s not as thick as it appears. However: this plant has sprung straight from the jaws of hell. I discovered after the 4th hour of chopping that it was something called a Cotoneaster. Sunset’s Western Garden book informs us that there are some 3 dozen varieties within this family. This is the worst of the lot. It has a horizontal habit, creeping quietly along the ground at a rate of nearly 3 feet per year in all directions. As it grows, it sends down roots from its branches. This allows the plant to have a maximum branch length of about 15 feet. It also means that the root ball is not isolated to the original planting spot. Instead, every single freaking branch has it’s own root ball. When this was planted, the home owner had made a feeble attempt to contain the monster. She put weed barrier down around it. This beast actually managed to send roots through the barrier, making pulling it out even harder! I had to pull, dig, cut weed barrier, clip with shears or saw off with a hand tool, yank some more. I had imagined that if I just at least sliced through all the main branches, the smaller ones, cut off from their nutrition source, would die and pull out easily. But once I recognized its rooting strategy, I knew this was hopeless. After 6 hours, this is what I have:
Oh snap! Is that a rhododendron? Where was that hiding?
My task for tomorrow: get those last stupid roots out and plant something pretty in there.

Oh and here's the best part: on the other side of that rhodie, the devil bush extends across a space of 30'x8'. I haven't even started thinking about that stuff.