Untangling unwanted enthusiastic plants

I won`t call them weeds, but we all know what I mean.
I have an area in my front garden I call my `secret garden where I experiment with alternative edible plants from around the world. To anyone uninitiated it looks like a normal garden albeit a bit messy, however almost everything in there has edible parts, though I haven`t sampled them all yet.
The problem I have in this area is ground elder (Aegopodium podagraria). Some was already in the garden. It makes a nice groundcover for the rasberries there. I use it a bit to make cordials, I`ve not tried other ways of eating it. Anyway, I don`t mind a bit of it. However it is gradually spreading through the garden, and has also been introduced in more areas with plant gifts that I obviously did not check adequately before planting out.

Ground elder in new Hosta plant

So how do I get a balance with thuggish plants like this around other plants I am trying to establish? I have a similar, less pleasant battle with nettles in my fruit jungle which makes raspberry picking a somewhat punishing pastime.

I don't know of any way to co-exist with ground elder, we have tons of it here probably about half an acre has it as the under-story, and it kills everything else it's busy killing my gooseberries at the moment. anything that is less than 50cm tall will be killed by it.

Deep shade seems to be the only thing that takes it out, that and grass.

I would prefer nettles to ground elder, at least they are easier to remove although I do not allow them anywhere in the "garden" areas as I also do not like being stung when trying to pick things.

As to using it, I find it has a very very strong flavour I have used it in asian style soups as a wilted green, but people who say OOH it's not a weed it's edible really annoy me, come on then eat the stuff I have, you'll eat nothing else and it will still be here, when you've died of boredom.

Give ground elder an inch and it will take your entire garden. Once it is well established in an area there is no point trying to take it out by half measures. You need to dig over the whole area and then fallow it for a time while you remove all the plantlets that regrow from root fragments, or properly sheet mulch it for a season, or call in a nuclear strike. Have zero tolerance for any reappearance and get any new plants out by the roots. If you have valued herbaceous perennials surrounded by ground elder, dig them up in winter or early spring and move them, being very careful to remove all (i.e. ALL) the spaghetti-like runners from the root ball. If it is under multi-stemmed canes/bushes like rasps or blackcurrants, continual attention with a trowel or narrow planting spade, removing all the runner you can find each time you see a shoot, will pay off eventually.

It should be said that ground elder is a nice vegetable - so long as you only use the newly-emerging, still-translucent leaf or flower shoots, fried in olive oil or butter. I keep a patch of the less-vigorous variegated cultivar under control in my allotment, but nothing could justify the amount of work caused by having it out of control throughout your garden.

We're not tangling with ground elder but I hear you. Our nemesis is an area of aggressive horsetail that appears to have been imported into perennial beds with a batch of topsoil or mulch a number of years ago. The previous owners just gave up on it. We are now engaged in the "big dig" chasing down each runner shrinking its footprint significantly each year. Also Asian bittersweet and poison ivy which grows at the forest edge and even after an area is cleared, birds import it after eating their berries elsewhere. Arrrgh! The solution is the same: Dig, pull. starve the roots. If you can eat some of it along the way, all the better.

Hmm, I think I`ll stop short of the nuclear option, but maybe I`ll have to replant the areas. (*****!) Oh well it`ll give me a chance to think about succession through the year again...
Thanks for telling me what I think I should have known - just hoping for a miracle!