I'm getting 3.4% likelihood on Plant@Net for Lonicera xylosteum on this shrub, but the photos show purple stems and hairy leaves like this. UBCBG have 41 different Lonicera, but nothing with that name. Is there something it's more likely to be? This has been planted along the sidewalk on the edge of a park in Chinatown.
Possibly..... but there are masses of Lonicera. Lonicera xylosteum...common name fly honeysuckle. I only found this since moving to Scotland. Found it growing in 3 different places. My pics so you can compare.
OH, no, I didn't post this last night. Thanks, @Silver surfer and now @Sulev. It certainly looks close enough to think it's honeysuckle. I think the leaf surface on your photos is rugose and is not so on my photos, and the veining is more indented on your photos. Also there are more secondary veins on my leaves (but not on some of Sulev's). So probably different. VanDusen BG also does not have L. xylosteum, which makes it even less likely to me.
As this is a planting in a City of Vancouver park, it's more likely Lonicera × purpusii 'Winter Beauty' (L. fragrantissimum × L. standishii), a particularly unruly shrub noted for its deliciously lemon-scented, winter-borne flowers. When cut back hard, as these shrubs have obviously been, the growth is exceptionally vigorous, and the shoots and leaves are more disposed to display the bristly hairs of the L. standishii parent (L. xylostemon is more softly hairy throughout and doubtfully cultivated locally). With luck, these Chinatown shrubs will not be re-pruned before producing their flowers. These appear on fully ripened growth as the leaves are senescing in autumn, and continuing through the winter if temperatures remain above freezing. If I'm right, they should be blooming right now.
OK, "right now" I was just putting off going for my morning coffee at 2pm, even though it was not freezing and not raining, so I fetched the latte and hopped the bus to Andy Livingston Park in Chinatown. It was a good sign that I could smell the flowers from over a meter away, though there were maybe only 20 open on this whole row of Winter Beauty honeysuckles, almost all of them right around where I was standing in the first photo. Second photo gives context for the location. My photos are from the sidewalk, the north side of these plants, west end of the row; there were fewer flowers on the south side, but this is just the start of their flowering season.
