No. Most of it is giant boulders. Fully half of it is inaccessible except by helicopter. We sent a smart, athletic, 26 year old Kenyan guy out to take pictures of the east half of it and within a minute he gave up and returned without anything. Most of the rest is also boulders, too, but you can scramble over it. There's a flat spot by the seasonal stream that is maybe 120' x 50' which is full of roses, iris, lavender, dianthus, artemisia, nepeta, salvia, daylilies, culinary herbs, currants, pinyon pine, lilies, and so on.
Right now the nepeta is so thick with bees you can hear it from ten or twenty feet away. In three weeks it will be the salvia that does it. It's the dianthus, though, that is drawing me into the garden right now. The whole place smells of clove and vanilla. There are two other areas. One is a little strip of vegetable garden that, so far has borne no vegetables whatsoever. A previous owner had planted raspberries here, but they have never bloomed. And they had planted grapes; but the grapes are programmed by nature to wait for warm soil. They always emerge right when the soil is too dry to support their growth, so they get smaller every year. There is also a thin strip that is actually the creek bottom. It's full of native grasses. That I mow to the ground about every other year.
There's another strip that parallels the driveway that's maybe 20 ft wide and 100 ft long that gets brutalized by the sun. So far I've been able to grow some iris and some daffodils in this area, but pretty much everything else dies instantly here including cold-hardy yuccas and other succulents. There's a native euphorbia that survives. And a lovely native gray-leaved grass. There's also a native grass that grows to six inches tall and sets seed that lives on nothing but sunlight and an inch of spring rain.
Stretches of the soil are loose fill sand and other stretches are some kind of impenetrable clay-like soil. In most areas there is not the tiniest bit of organic matter in the soil. We've moved some boulders into this area and we allow it to look pretty much as nature would otherwise devise. I have - from time to time - removed some broad leafed volunteers from the area so that the beauty of the blue-gray grasses shines through.
So when one approaches the house, there's no hint that anyone is trying to grow roses or any other non-native plant. I have had ambitions from time to time to change this, but frequently I am satisfied with its natural look. It's completely consistent with the way neighbors have treated their properties near the road. And it's consistent with the rugged views we see out our windows.
