Landscaping Challenges

Our front yard presents a lot of serious challenges...

The lawn is really nothing but weeds. We don't water it in the summer so it turns dry and yellow but it turns green as soon as the rains come. It is large and steep, so planting something more drought tolerant would be prohibitively expensive. If I could, I would plant something like carex which is green, has an interesting texture, doesn't take much water and doesn't need to be mowed.

The California live oaks have gotten really tall since they were last topped about five years ago. A lot of the lower branches burned in the fire and we had them taken off which seems to have encouraged more growth. They screen the house from the street but the slope is steep enough that we still have a nice view.

The area between the fence and the street gets progressively steeper until nothing will grow because the water just runs off. We planted the little tree next to the driveway, a Chinese Pistache, which is barely growing in the rocky soil but is valiantly leafing out this spring. Three rose bushes  are barely visible because the deer eat the flowers as fast as they bloom, and the spiky blue echium which didn't bloom the first year but now are thriving. The rest of the plants, which are looking their best right now, are either volunteers, like the poppies, or have determinedly come back after being taken out. The brilliant pink ice plant is incredible when it blooms, but looks terrible for the other 11 months of the year. We took out the purple Spanish lavender because it burns like a torch, but these came back. Or maybe they burned and came back on their own. 

The second half of the slope is where the fire burned through and we haven't replanted it because we can't find anything that will grow there. The fire burned across the lawn and all the way up to the driveway where it turned the olive hedge to black sticks. Our gardener told us that if we watered them they would come back, and he was right. The hedge, not visible in this picture, is now, three years later, fully restored and the ground squirrels have moved back into their burrow underneath. 

We have decided to answer the challenge of the front lawn by doing nothing...or at least nothing that requires maintenance. Big rocks would be nice, and we have plenty of those, but we would have to dig a deep hole to keep them from rolling down to the street. Sometimes benign neglect is the best approach, especially when one lives on a flat spot in the middle of a steep hill, the base of which is 40%rock, 50%clay and a mere 10%layer of soil between them. We know, because we had our extra lot, the field above the house tested. Nothing grows there because all we do is have it mowed as soon as the grass is tall enough to hide the wildflowers and turns brown. This is a mandatory requirement of Cal Fire for fire prevention reasons. Nobody around here argues with that.