Sammy, I have ordered so many seeds from Plants of the SW. Last fall I started adding native grasses which are easy from seed and so pretty. Most everything I am growing withstood the drought with very little trouble. The Muhly grasses are harder to get germination but are very much worth the effort. Santa Rosa Gardens sells many native grasses and has good sales each spring and fall. I ordered quite a few last fall. I also ordered a few from High Country Gardens. You can build over time and add special things. I started Desert Marigolds a few years ago and these have naturalized. Blue foliage with yellow flowers all spring, summer into December, like perfect bouquets. They would do well on your slope. My property is on a slope, but not as steep. I wish I had a slope exactly like you have, there are so many drought loving plants you could grow there without worrying about drainage. You could also add cold hardy agaves which would look great with the grasses and do very well in that situation for a touch of exotic and good texture combinations. Large rocks would look fantastic. The choices of plants is endless because you have that perfect drainage and can grow things otherwise impossible. Cold hardy agaves include: Parryi, Harvardiana, shindaggers and a couple others. Check out High Country Gardens for cold hardy ones and other drought loving plants. We have a cactus show here in OKC each spring and you can buy the agaves there and Kelly Grummons at Cold Hardy Cactus online sells them too. When I saw the photo, I just went crazy and thought "Oh wow, let me plant that!" Its perfect for the kinds of plants I love and it looks like you have it all ready for planting by clearing it off. This could be a whole lot of fun to do. The money, yep, its cheap. Many of the grasses establish well in one season and then its just low maintenance. I have run out of room here and need a bigger area just for the grasses because I wish I could do drifts. We did river rock gravel and its fine now but the first season we had some trouble with runoff and I had to go retrieve some of it in the wheel barrow. I think you would need some heavy rough edged gravel other than river rock to keep it from sliding downhill until its established. Here a some photos of the plants I have that I grew mostly from seeds I got at Plants of the Southwest. The yellow flowers are the Desert Marigolds, bitterweed and dogweed, there is a Silver King Artemsia by the wall and a Rabbit Bush, the pink ones are Flame Flowers a large Russian Sage by the street and various grasses, native "weeds" and cactus. This was shot in August in the middle of the drought.

I have one of those across the street. It's owned by a former REA who is sure that someone desperate to live here (inventory is very, very low, but all priced less than hers), or a foreigner with cash who doesn't know any better will be willing to pay the somewhat-too-high price - which has dropped over the years, but never quite fast enough to keep up with the market drop. (ie dropped asking to $599K but the most recent sale was $549K) The house is beautiful and we can't believe that moved to another state after all the remodel work they did. But they do have a big loan on the home, so I know they can't go too low. And then there are the little issues, like the fact that the kitchen and master bath counters were built for their height (they were both over 6' tall) and the well-done but unsightly addition they did (thinking that going from 2400sf to 2700sf was the magic trick to sell after all these years). After an unsuccessful year, they leased for one year, and it's been on the market (again) since Feb, but we all just noticed the sign disappeared so no telling what they're going to try next.

You have an admirable goal, but I am another soul that wants to weigh in on the side of caution as far as perhaps getting into a project that's potentially unmanageable. So I have a bunch of questions and comments as well as some links to add to what others have said. Can you get a group of volunteers to meet and help on a regular basis in maintaining this? I know the Peterborough NH parks' gardens are all volunteer maintained, but they meet once a week in the early morning for a few hours and there are several in the group. The man who is the designer and organizes the crew has a list of specific tasks each week. Here's a link to the part of his blog that discusses the setup of what he calls a public-private partnership, so the gardens were installed by the town dept. of public works, but are maintained by volunteers about whose work he occasionally writes. You can also click on each garden on the right side of the page for more info. His are more traditional looking gardens that what you are envisioning, but both need maintenance. One of his most useful pieces of advice to my mind is "Design only what you can maintain at the highest level. Long-term maintenance is the key." Are you interested in only native New England plants? It seems as though you want to include them, but also some hardy, low-care non-native perennials (Russian sage.) By nature, New England is naturally a forest, so does your goal include woody plants such as trees and shrubs? If not, you will have considerably more work removing woody plants that will try to move in courtesy of the natural ways plants seed themselves into new territory. The books of William Cullina (former director of the New England Wild Flower Society (NEWFS) and current director of the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden) will be of help in finding natives that suit your situation as will the many resources of the NEWFS. Because that is a cut bank, it is subsoil and not all plants will be happy there with low nutrients and fast drainage, so keep that in mind when choosing plants. You might want to get a soil test done. The area at the top will be much drier than that at the bottom, so plan and plant accordingly. Michael Gordon of Gardener's Eye says, "Prepare soil properly from the onset" which in your case (since you can't dig other than to plant on that slope) may include adding some slow release fertilizer, some compost and as Thyme2dig says above, mulch, lots of mulch. Mulch in the short term will discourage weed seeds from germinating and help maintain even moisture, and long term will add to the soil fertility. I would recommend either curls from a wood turner or chips from a tree service or the crews that maintain the local power lines since both will break down well and until them be more stable on the slope than some other mulch options, and either is free. Have you got the support of whomever does the maintenance for the rest of the property as well the administration? For instance, many of the plants you will want to use are spreaders, either by seed or by runners. If they seed over into the lawn in your photo, will that cause issues? As an example, my back field (quite nutrient poor, sandy acid loam on a very slight slope) has two of the grasses mentioned in the meadow kit from the NEWFS, Eragrostis spectabilis (purple lovegrass) and Schizachrium scoparium (little bluestem). Both are happy in the poor soil, generally low maintenance (the field gets mowed twice a year) and gorgeous in fall. In this photo the lovegrass is the broad swath of red-purple and the little bluestem is the darker, taller grass that shows in a couple of clumps near the edges of the lovegrass. Here's a photo of little bluestem from closer up taken on my way home today. As perhaps you can tell, it is growing in the sandy area along the edge of the road, so it's fine with poor soil. This is just the wild type, but you can also get named varieties that have more of the bluish tones or more of the reddish tones. I think it's really attractive. However, the lovegrass's seedheads behave like tumbleweed, shedding seed as they move, so I find lovegrass in the gravel drive, the veggie garden, etc. Another issue might be the maintenance crew weed whacking your garden, not realizing that it was a deliberate planting. I once had someone hedge prune a lovely shrub to a sheared blob in a public garden I had planted. Is there a water source to get plants established, either hoses from the school or a tank on a truck? All new plantings will be more successful if you can water them when rainfall isn't adequate. I don't want to discourage you, but setting realistic goals will be the key to your success. If there is a local garden club or other group that can be persuaded to see your vision and help consistently , all the better. Steps in order: -Figure out what's there, what can stay (I think I see a few shrubby white pines, for instance) and what to remove. -Create a design (including a plant list) that can be implemented in stages while still maintaining what has already been planted. -With whatever help you have available, implement the first stage. To give a sense of scale, a few years ago, I put in a large mixed perennial and shrub border that's probably 70'x15', working on my own, but with a tractor at my disposal, and the area had already been cleared. It took me 3 full seasons to plant: the first year doing prep, woody plants, and mulching for the first chunk; the second year adding perennials and adding another 15'x15' piece and the third year planting the additional piece and replacing plants that didn't do well from the first two seasons. So take creating it in chunks, but plan the whole thing before your start.

Your not fixing it without busting it up and repouring. I would think long and hard about the amount of work this will take, although if it is still a fresh pour now is the easiest time to break it up. From pics 1 and 3 it does not look too awful steep but #3 makes it seem not good. Up to you.