The front of my new place is awash with purple Lantana (Lantana montevidensis). It is lovely stuff if you are both color blind (unless you're into this sort of purple, nothing wrong with that!) and an admirer of wildlife. There are butterflies, bees, spiders, and lizards all over it. It is absolutely marvelous for year-round blooming and needs no supplemental water once established (at least not here, I turned the irrigation off last fall).The flowers are the pepto bismol of purples - not my favorite, though maybe someday I will find a companion plant with a color that mitigates the pepto purple hue. Meh, maybe not. A dear friend of mine said that the overwhelming amount of purple Lantana in my garden made my place look like a retirement home.As much as I'd like to be able to retire (I'd still spend my time designing gardens - I love it that much), I am not ready to live in a dadgum retirement home! Talk about death by association; I can't look at it anymore without thinking about retirement homes. As if that wasn't bad enough, my lovely boyfriend thinks the foliage smells like poo (the flowers smell nice at night). Charming: a poo scented retirement home.Here's my vexation: as much as I intend to remove the Lantana and put in other stuff, it is happy, healthy, requires no water, and supports oodles of critters. So for now it stays.... providing food and shelter for all those bugs and lizards, but lookout, Lantana! You're living on borrowed time. Wanna know what I think might fill the space above? I'm considering a collection of spineless Opuntia that my friend Melinda sent me from Texas along with a few I've collected on my own here. The ones from Texas are rooting in the shed right now - cross your fingers that they all take!So there's my dilemma - removing the Lantana removes habitat, but goodness gracious, there's so danged much of it, I don't really like it, and the new design/plants aren't ready yet. Patience....