Desert Landscaping

Yeah, I told you this would be a post unto itself. :)

Yards out here aren't grass. They're rock and gravel. Grass just takes way too much water, and dies in the summer heat anyway. So, instead, they have what they call, desert landscaping. As best I can tell, it's something akin to Japanese rock gardens. Remove all the rocks that naturally occur in your yard, and replace them with the rocks that you want. The result, if you do it nicely, is something like this:

You arrange the gravel and the rocks in nice patterns and such, border things in your yard, hope that a tiny little bush or two might grow. There are even some yards with trees! OK, so that was a little sarcastic, but it's true - yards really don't have much greenery in them. Just takes too much work and water. There is some greenery in bloom now, like the pretty pink flowers below, but that's because (believe it or not!) this is the Green Season. Well, I guess compared to 120+ degrees in the summer, this is pretty green :)

It's taking some getting used to, like most things around here :) Makes the whole place brown - houses, roofs, buildings, yards... And there's still a part of me that can't get my mind wrapped around the idea of a rock yard. The nice ones look alright, but there are a lot that just strike me as ... unfinished, I guess. Like the site is still under construction and they're just waiting for the yard to be seeded. Watch, though - by Christmas time, we'll have been here most of a year and we'll visit family for the holidays or something, and we'll be so used to this, we'll be marveling at the greenery back east. Well, maybe ;)