Winter cleaning a garden bed

Another absolutely gorgeous day.  The sun is shining, the birds are chirping and the bees are buzzing!

Every since last year, I have been perplexed about what to do with my south-most porch bed.  The Esperanza gets so huge, the Obedient plant and St John's Wort takes over, and nothing else seems to grow.  Okay, that is not really true:  The lantana are small and pretty, and the salvia does pretty well.  The fire bush looks pretty during the summer.  But this bed lacks shape.  As you can see from the photo above, during the winter, it is a big brown mess.  And during the summer, it really doesn't look much better.

I wish I had taken a before picture, but the Obedient plant from last year was taking over the entire south part of the bed.  Last year I had removed a lot of it, but I finally decided to bite the bullet and remove it all.  I did transplant some of it to the south corner bed, and there is already some of it that seems to have taken root from last year.  But I have just decided that this plant belongs in the back of the bed, not the front... As it just takes over my small bed.

I also dug up some weeds, heavily trimmed back the salvia and pulled out some of the dead fountain grass.  I probably should have trimmed it, and not pulled it, but when I was messing around the plant getting up the small green weeds, tufts and tufts of the fountain grass came out...

Unfortunately, it all of my weeding, I might have pulled up my Day Lilly.  I didn't notice it in the area, and was madly pulling up all of the offending Obedient Plant, when I realized I was right in the area of the day lilly... and I saw no sign of it.  Sigh.

My two lorapetulum have done very little since planting them almost a year ago. They have had some very small blooms - like one or two.

But overall, the plant is no bigger (and possibly smaller) than when I planted it a year ago -- Far from the big shrub that I hoped would bring color and shape to this bed in the winter.

I did give both plants a long deep soaking, hoping to kick-start them into some spring growth.