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HARRIET HOWARD HEITHAUS

Ricky Pires, a volunteer with Collier Audubon and FGCU, hands Cathy Feser, Collier County Extension Service urban horticulture agent, a branch for her pronouncement: Is it friend or foe in the war to get invasives out of the yard?

HARRIET HOWARD HEITHAUS

Ian Orlikoff trims the branches from a eucalyptus tree that has grown over power lines in the yard slated for an "X-treme Yard Makeover." Determining the tree’s potential height and canopy are critical before any tree is planted.

HARRIET HOWARD HEITHAUS

Daphne Volcy, in garden hat and sun block, hasn’t let the South Florida Water Management District do all the work in re-invigorating her yard. She moved plants and bricks with other volunteers last weekend.

Courtesy USDA

Brazilian pepper was among the invasives being pulled up last weekend in the yard makeover; they’re a familiar sight along I-75 in Collier and Lee counties. This file photo of a mature specimen is from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which points out that it is an allergen as well as an invasive.

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X-TREME YARD MAKEOVER, PART III: This weekly series through June 28 chronicles the public-private creation of a model Southwest Florida landscape designed for environmental responsibility, easy maintenance and continuing curb appeal. Coming June 14: Matching your water system to your plants.

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Every week is a revelation during the X-treme Yard Makeover project in North Naples.

This past week, the revelation is that Daphne Volcy’s Cinderella front yard at 7050 Trail Blvd. had trees few people would have expected to be there: three Chinaberries, a eucalyptus tree and a java plum. They’re gone, having grown around power lines or bent by hurricanes to the point at which they were stressed and straggly.

Another revelation is that the volunteers who have come to clean out the yard for grading aren’t only the master gardener volunteers from the Collier County Extension Service.

"So many people have been talking to me as a real-estate agent about what’s invasive in a yard, especially now that we’ve had drought restrictions," explained Paula Angelopoulos of Team Urbinati, a 20-year Naples resident who showed up with work gloves, water bottle and willing hands. "I want to learn for myself — to educate myself, and then my clients."

An energized crowd of nearly 20 people dug into bushes, clipping off unwieldy foliage and yanking out the roots. Work that was scheduled to take from 9 a.m. to 11 was finished by 10:15 a.m., including the removal of loose brick on an unfinished front porch patio that will be replaced. Volcy herself, in a sun hat, had been hauling plants away for either recycling or disposal. The only chore left was carting yard waste via front-end loader to a quickly stuffed dumpster; Yahl Mulching and Recycling pulled up with a second for the overflow as the volunteers worked.

This was a week in which everyone involved in the South Florida Water Management District demonstration yard project could see where things go wrong and leave a lawn in need of dire change.

1. Trees are not planted with an idea of how tall and how wide they will be at maturity. Nor are they pruned at the optimum time to be trained.

"A lot of people wait till the tree is way out of control to prune it. By then the pruning is so involved that it stresses the tree," explained Ian Orlikoff of Signature Tree Removal of Naples. He had just come down from a bucket-truck perch, from where he sawed off chunks of the yard’s 50- foot-tall eucalyptus tree. It had towered over and branched into power lines along Trail Boulevard.

When the tree is young — even within three years of its purchase as a sapling — is the time for professionals to be shaping it for a good structure, he emphasized, "but that’s when people least think of pruning it."

2. Keep interlopers out of the flower beds and landscaping islands now to save killing everything later.

"If we don’t want it, it’s a weed," Cathy Feser, urban horticulture agent for the Collier County Extension Service, called out, wisecracking to her crew as the group clipped off branches and carried away bush carcasses.

In a serious vein, the group had hoped to recycle plants, but they would have trouble saving some good shrubbery where invasives had grown up around the bases, entangling their roots into the domesticated garden. A small number of plants — most of them potted, such as aloe and kalanchoe — will reappear in bedding. But many shrubs had lethal ingrowth.

The master gardeners were pulling out Brazilian pepper, a sweet-looking shrub which fruits with red berries, and which was once imported from its native South America as an ornamental for Florida. The plant reproduced itself in nearly every way possible, including from birds carrying the fruit and from roots that sprouted new plants. It has become a major problem — occupying more area than any other invasive species in the state, according to the Agricultural Research Service of the USDA.

After May 31, it would at least be gone from this front yard.

3. Plants need to be paired to their climates and sun exposure.

"This place needs salt-tolerant plantings," observed Feser, looking westward. "It’s got a western exposure and that means sun, wind, salt and water." At less than a half-mile from the Gulf of Mexico and facing it, the new yard has to be ready for Southwest Florida weather head-on. That may change the plant and turf choices from a team that has included the water management district, several universities and at least 25 volunteer companies.

To Adam McGovern, a landscape designer II at Johnson Engineering, Fort Myers, the project’s goal of working with natives does limit its palette somewhat.

"One of the things as a designer we typically have problems with down here, honestly, is the native requirement imposed on landscaping by the counties and statutory agencies," he said. "You just don’t have as wide a selection a lot of times."

He’s hoping that more research will be done that can broaden tolerance for plants and trees that may not be native, but grow like Florida natives without becoming aggressive. For the moment, however, his company is happy to be contributing to creating this yard. Johnson Engineering works largely on commercial and high-density projects, but places like 7050 Trail Blvd. are what will change Florida, he said.

"If you’re able to research low-impact development, you learn that one of to best places to do it is at residential level," he said.

"You can draw a line around where all this water goes into the Gulf from, and the vast majority of land that falls under it is residential. So you may say my one yard won’t make a difference. But the residential yards definitely impact our environment in a major way."

When the yard is finished June 28, everyone involved hopes it will lead that impact in the right direction.