Small Walls, Big Difference

Front yards covered with crushed rock.

The way developers of residential tracts work, they do some basic wholesale landscaping in the front yards so the streets and houses all look neat, nice and ready to move in. Each front yard gets a tree or two (mesquite, palo verde or shoestring acacia), some bushes (Mexican bird of paradise, cenizo, or trumpet flower), maybe a golden barrel cactus, and lots of hardy, flowery lantana plants, all planted on small mounds of topsoil because each site has been stripped of its native soil down to the hard caliche.

Each front yard is dotted with three or four large boulders, weighing probably one or two hundred pounds each. The boulders are jagged, easily fractured reddish rocks of a variety mined some place else because, like the ubiquitous crushed rock, they are very different from the local native rock, especially the pale granite Catalina rock that is common to the Tortolitas as well as the Santa Catalina Mountains.

An automatic irrigation system is installed so the plants do not wither, die, or look bad over the weeks or months it takes to sell the house. Plus, many buyers are not into gardening and without automatic sprinkling, some lots would end up with dead plantings. That ruins the ambience of the developer’s neighborhood.

One of the grand entrances to the “Saguaro Reserve” tracts being developed just north of our tract.

When the developers bulldoze native vegetation, roads and building sites for a new tract, they always begin with the entrance and a grand monument bearing the pretentiously magnificent name for the tract, often named after a native plant that was bulldozed to clear the lots; like, “Saguaro Reserve,” “Blue Agave” and “Blue Agave II.” The entrance is the first area that the developers landscape. It makes a nice, finished first impression while the tract itself looks like an open pit mine.

The grand entrances and the front yards of each finished tract house are uniformly covered with the same crushed rock. In addition to desert-color conformity and the need to discourage lawns, the crushed rock serves to cover and hide a considerable amount of construction waste: bits of roof tiles and perimeter wall concrete blocks, plastic sheeting, styrofoam, nails, caffeine drink cans, candy wrappers, cardboard, and layers of concrete left over from when they mixed it on the caliche.

Digging the trench for the larger wall requires a jackhammer
to break up the caliche and some place to pile the dirt.

In short, we live in a neighborhood where the front yards look alike and somewhat unnatural.

We inherited two mounds in our front yard that are a bit larger than what the developer dumped on other front yards. Looking out front at the mound outside my new office window, I would see the uniformly crushed rock everywhere, as well as three large, black plastic clean-out sanitary sewer drain caps. The front yard is also adorned with two storm drain outlets and a flat, rectangular metal cover with “Tuscon Water” written on it. To hide these embellishments, I covered the clean out caps and lined the house-facing sides of both mounds with native rock. Over the weeks we were moving in, I employed Agamemnon each day to bring a load of plants and rocks from our little acre on San Simeon. Now when I gaze out from my office window, I see my private view of native rock.

Shari’s very excellent stucco finish.

I tore out each lantana plant in the front yard (Shari is allergic to their pungent fragrance), and planted some small saguaros, barrel cacti, hedgehog cactus, pincushion cactus, a sotol (desert spoon), a Mexican fence post, and Mexican aloes to begin the process of making the front yard Tom-friendly.

Since March, out attention has been towards making the backyard livable. Now that the back is substantially completed, we have started work on redefining the two mounds where they face the street with low, cement block walls. Trenches have to be dug and it doesn’t take long before shovel meets caliche. Out comes my trusty electric jackhammer. Excavated dirt is neatly piled on double layered drop cloths until a level plane is carved out, pea gravel spread, and blocks placed.

Agamemnon’s load number four:
fifteen blocks, two 60 lb. bags of concrete mix,
and two tubes of Liquid Nails.

I can rough in the wall and stucco, but it takes Shari to smooth the cement finish so evenly that a stucco professional would be envious. Neighbors passing by on their walks stop to praise the work — in large part because of Shari’s finish.

Agamemnon has served valiantly hauling some eighty concrete blocks (2700 lbs), 28 concrete caps (some 225 lbs.), 360 lbs. of concrete mix, 120 lbs. of pea gravel, and 160 lbs. of stucco mix — six or seven trips; all in all some 3500 lbs. or over 1600 kg. Only one or two 80 lb. bags of stucco mix and a tube of Liquid Nails left to haul.

I used to identify our house by clicking the remote garage door opener. The house with the garage door opening was ours. Now guests can identify our house by the small, architectural walls in the front yard. Nice.

After seven days of work.

Backyard Bliss

It is a much smaller canvas than the little acre we had at San Simeon, but it has its charm and it requires a lot less work.

The huge pergola and two trellises provide shade, as will the two mesquite as they grow and spread wide. The planter on the right has already grown a bumper crop of basil, and the recently planted seeds of Chinese broccoli (gail lan or kailan), arugula, and dill have sprouted. The rest of the yard is devoted to drought-tolerant cactus, agave, yucca and euphorbia — “drought” being a somewhat odd term to use in the Sonoran Desert as the climate is mostly drought. Maybe “desert-tolerant” would be more appropriate.

“B-island” L to R: octopus agave, saguaro, totem pole cactus & behind it a golden torch cactus, joshua tree yucca.

From the drone perspective, the yard isn’t quite as interesting as from ground level. In my imaginative mind’s eye, I think of the rocks as Yosemite-sized walls.

“B-island” L to R: Hedgehog cactus, totem pole cactus, saguaro, artichoke agave (foreground), octopus agave.

“A-island,” “B-island,”
and the corn-husker.

As I carefully place large, medium and small rocks then scatter pebbles and sand scraped from wash deposits, I feel as if my childhood love of model trains has found a new expression.

Here we are in November and we have some flowers blooming. I like to think that is evidence that the plants are happy. (The alternative explanation is that the plants are desperately trying to propagate before they croak.)

Most plants don’t like being dug up and moved. It’s certainly true of cacti. I know the torch cacti we brought over in pots from San Simeon had trouble adjusting as their pots got moved out of the way several times over some nine months. I finally planted them under the big trellis over the raised desert garden.

A couple of smaller torches are still struggling, poor things, but two of the tall specimens seem to be happy being freed from the confines of a pot and finally planted. Either that, or the trellis shade allowed them to survive the summer sun, and now that the sun is lower on the horizon, they are able to enjoy its less fierce sunshine and decided to bloom. That's the fourth flower on the one on the left.

We still have several places available for additional plantings in C- and D-islands, but the sense of urgency has diminished because I know enough that some of these plant get big. For some like saguaros and joshua trees, that will take decades; for others, a couple of years and they will be crowded.

Another reason to shift attention is that we are now tackling the two “pony” walls in the front yard. The smaller one is up and I am using my trusty electric jackhammer to dig into the caliche for the trench in which the larger one will rest its bottom row of concrete blocks. Stay tuned.