DAVID ALBERS / Staff

Daphne Volcy's North Naples home has become a test site for the South Florida Water Management District's "X-Treme Yard Makeover" project illustrating the creation of a "Florida-friendly" landscape.

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Fat rectangles of sod, snuggled side by side in a verdant quilt, tempt bare toes to try out a footing surprisingly tender for a Florida yard.

Baby-blanket pink pentas, their starry clusters ready to feed some passing butterfly, flank a brick lanai and a bed of several strappy-leaved dracaenas. On the other side, confederate jasmine begins a fragrant climb up a trellis.

To the right, grass and a good-size mulch bed deserving of some fruit trees. To the left, dwarf palms and a deep rose crepe myrtle, hot-pink bougainvillea, blue plumbago and a field of dune sunflowers barely a half-foot into their growth.

The product of the five-week experiment called an “X-treme Yard Makeover,” hasn’t been extreme at all. But that is just what Daphne Volcy, who volunteered her highly visible front yard for a public Cinderella treatment, wanted. No neon effects and no shrubbery that demands designer haircuts. This is a place she can relax in after work or where she can play games with her 4-year-old grandson over a Saturday morning.

There’s also that oh-so-American goal of being yard-proud.

“When people used to ask me where my house was or how to find it, I would tell them, ‘just look for the worst yard on the block,’” she said last week, looking at her new patch of parkland. “It’s just breathtakingly beautiful.”

At the same time, she wanted what the South Florida Water Management District wanted for its first model yard: a neutral ground in the fragile Florida environment. This one was landscaped so it didn’t need the kind of fertilizer that seeps into and slowly poisons the Gulf of Mexico. It doesn’t crave as much water as other lawns, and grows slowly, a blessing for her mower.

When visitors come tomorrow for the public open house, they’ll see the best of what’s been developed and tested for Florida in Volcy’s nearly 150 square test feet of yard. The turf is Empire Zoysiiagrass that grows more slowly and is drought-tolerant because its life-giving stolons grow largely underground and out of the sun.

The yard also holds plants that most people can find at a local garden center or big-box nursery that are drought-tolerant. These aren’t necessarily natives, as Mike Malloy, Collier County coordinator for the Florida Yards and Neighborhoods program, points out. They’re just hard workers. Those who come to see the model yard Saturday will get not only smoothie samples, fruit kabobs and a stroll on grass good enough to go barefoot in, but also Malloy’s bible for a low-water yard, “A Guide to Florida-Friendly Landscaping.”

Until this year, Malloy had a lonely job in a county where people have little relationship with their yards. Devastating as it was, last winter’s drought and the resulting restrictions of once-a-week irrigation shocked people into seeing the need for landscaping that rolls with the punches, he said.

“People’s lawns were dying and they were still seeing that water hasn’t come up to the level it should be at. I think our table is still 4 to 6 inches below where it should be,” said Malloy. He’s a one-time landscaper who has only left a few strips of grass in his own heavily shrubbed and tree-lined yard — and pays water bills as low as $45 a month.

“People are starting to take grass out of their yard, and we’re getting condo complexes calling about ground cover alternatives,” he said. “I can see changes happening in Naples.”

He and his fellow yard evaluators are booked into July with requests from homeowners who want to change their yards. They welcome more, however, and they’ll be at Volcy’s Saturday morning, ready to listen to visitors, he said.

“We’re not just here to do evaluations for the ‘Florida Friendly Yard’ designations. We get all kinds of requests for all kinds of reasons, but largely people are realizing they also save money when they water less.”

Visitors can expect a cadre of golf shirts in bright colors Saturday, because all the companies that volunteered services or products will be there to explain theirs. There is a Hunter irrigation system that even sticks a technological finger up to the wind when it waters. It checks on soil moisture at various stations before it sends out the first unnecessary drop.

There are local companies like Greenscapes, which offers beyond-the-mower yard care; Forestry Resources, distributors of the Zoysiagrass and manufacturers of locally produced melaleuca mulch; Superior Interlock Paving, which installed Volcy’s unusual weed-free, fast-draining lanai; and more.

Still, as Judy Haner, media specialist from the South Florida Water Management District, pointed out, Saturday’s event isn’t the end. It’s just the beginning of tracking the success of the low-demand yard it and the Collier County Extension Service designed.

Staff members will be back out in three months, six months and perhaps at a year to record the changes in the yard and Volcy’s feelings about upkeep. The University of South Florida is hoping to make a Spanish language videotape of the experience.

Volcy, a scheduling nurse in her early 60s, says she’s ready to learn, including the botanical names for her new plants: “People have asked me about them, and I want to be able to tell them.” Above all, she wants to be able to educate her grandson in living with a responsible landscape.

“When we drove into the driveway after everything had been installed, he didn’t even wait for me. He had undone his seat belt and opened the door to run over to the pink flowers. He put his hands so gently on top of them. And then he ran over to the palms and just put his hands under the leaves just brushing them,” she recalled.

It may have been the 4-year-old’s rendition of her own reaction when she came home from work Tuesday night to find all the sod and mulch in around her new plants.

“I hadn’t expected it, and I was just in awe. I just sat right down there and cried it was so beautiful,” she said.

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If you go

What: “X-treme Yard Makeover” including yard tours, Florida-friendly Yard landscaping materials, refreshments and more

Where: 7050 Trail Blvd., North Naples. Free parking and shuttle at Covenant Presbyterian Church, 66926 Trail Blvd.

When: 9 a.m. to noon Saturday

Admission: Free

Information: 263-7615 or www.sfwmd.gov/bcb/

Sponsors: South Florida Water Management District, the Collier County Extension Service, several Florida universities and landscape/garden businesses