Toni,
Russian sage has never grown for me. I tried it in NJ and it died immediately. I tried it here and it died in fourteen months without ever growing. I know it's supposed to be one of the easiest plants on earth to grow, but I've failed with it a total of four or five times. And there hundreds of thousands of cultivars that I haven't yet failed with even once. So I'll try some of them first.
Yarrow might work. There's some white flowered yarrow that was here when I arrived. For a while I cultivated it. Then I realized it's a thug. It slowly spreads everywhere and is virtually impossible to eradicate. When you dig it up one place it pops up somewhere else. I have Achillea Moonshine planted in one spot in the garden and I like its yellow flowers and silvery foliage. It doesn't romp about the garden. So it's a possibility.
Cindi, this photo - which is essentially the view out my office window looking down the driveway toward the street - depicts one rocky part of the property in a different area where it's comparatively easy to walk.
The big boulder you see there is about twelve feet high and wide. The smaller ones are three or four feet in each direction. In this photo you can see that one can walk between big boulders and 'easily' get somewhere else. This contrasts markedly with the inaccessible part where the smallest boulders are 12 ft across and they are too close together to walk between.
Some of the people here have heard the story of my wife who was convinced that she could walk to the other end of the property; after all it is only two hundred yards away. An hour and a half later she arrived home visibly shaken. She told me "I made it within a hundred feet of the end of the property but I simply couldn't get back. I was going to call 911 but then I thought about how the conversation would go. The first question would be 'Where are you.' And I'd have to respond 'In my back yard.'"
Porkpal, It is absolutely gorgeous. I feel like I'm living in a national park. There actually is one just a mile to the west. It's probably better than most in this zip code, but the property is not ideally suited to every kind of agriculture.
