Four years ago, Eframo heard then Gov. Olene Walker's plea for Utahns to fight the drought by conserving water. She studied the "Slow the Flow" messages from the Jordan Valley Water Conservation District and the city of West Jordan itself - neither of which apparently expected anyone to take them seriously.

Eframo, a 73-year-old retiree from Delta Air Lines, shut off her sprinklers and planted more than 200 drought-resistant plants. The diminutive woman saw xeriscaping as a mission. "The future depends on us learning to conserve water," she says.

Unfortunately, her suburban neighbors have come to see the resulting unkept front yard as an all-out assault on their property values.

"I'm a rebel," Eframo says looking with disgust at the manicured lawns that surround her. "They don't seem to understand we're living in a desert. We've got to save water."

A short drive through the serpentine residential developments that comprise the southern Salt Lake Valley reveals the monolithic culture of grass that Eframo is rebelling against.

During most of Utah's dry summer, her yard is dotted with hardy wildflowers and aspen runners. The fall rains, however, have brought her dormant bluegrass back.

"This is the way God meant it to be," Eframo says of the climate cycle. "Why waste water to have a green lawn for a few months a year?"

West Jordan City officials will not say how many neighborhood complaints and official warnings have been filed against her, only that the list covers a couple pages in her file. Even more telling, if you ask about Eframo at the mayor's or city attorney's office, workers know exactly who you mean.

David Rice, conservation programs manager at Jordan Valley Conservancy District, which supplies water to the southern suburbs, applauds Eframo's resolve. After all, his job is to encourage such behavior.

If you are put on hold while calling the conservancy district, you'll hear a recording of football Hall of Famer and state icon Merlin Olsen siding with Eframo. "We live in a very dry state," Olsen chides homeowners, "Yet many people landscape their yards as if we lived in Seattle."

But Rice also understands her neighbors' queasiness with her attempt at desertscaping. "I can see both sides of it," he says. "Her attitude is right, but it might send the wrong message about xeriscaping to her neighbors."

South Jordan's water conservation technician Steve Glain says the city encourages xeriscaping. "There's plenty of latitude in our code that allows an extremely wide variety of landscaping," he says. "But anything can be taken to extreme. This suggests something about this particular resident, not our code."

Eframo's minimalist lawn aesthetic - she refuses to replace turf with decorative gravel or wood chips - is not appreciated by her neighbors, South Jordan's water conservation technician Steve Glain says.

"We are not isolated from each other in the community," he says. "Part of this issue is respecting your neighbors and adjusting your landscape to blend in."

Eframo complains that it is her neighbors who are selfish. "It's unbelievable the amount of water they waste. You would think they never heard of the drought," she says.

But even Rice, a guru of water-wise landscaping, is less than enthralled with Eframo's handiwork. "She's just kind of leaving what is there and planting within it," he says. "Probably this fight is coming out of the perception that she is simply not maintaining her lawn."

Her neighbors might be more accepting, he says, if she appeared to be working from a landscape design. The lack of planning seems even more obvious in the fall, when rain brings back much of the non-native grass.

Despite West Jordan's Web site encouraging homeowners "to maintain a water-wise lifestyle, even after the current drought ends, in order to protect our scarce resources for future generations," the city dragged Eframo into court last year to face several hundred dollars in fines.

Steve Stewart, who took her case for free, got it thrown out on a constitutional issue, arguing that West Jordan's law was too vague to be enforced fairly.

City Prosecutor Michaela Andruzzi says the city simply wants Eframo to comply with the ordinance. "We want to keep our neighborhoods looking nice and our property values high. We are not trying to put people in jail for an ugly yard."

After getting her off, Stewart advised his client along the same lines: "Alexandra, I just want to keep you out of jail," he said. "I would rather prevent a charge from being filed against you than deal with one after it's filed."

He offered to get volunteers to help her finish the landscaping. The city has made similar offers; even some police officers offered to work in her yard, Andruzzi says.

Eframo declined the offers of help because she fears the volunteers would not share her desert aesthetic. Besides, she says, "I like to do it myself. I love digging in the dirt."

But after being briefly hospitalized earlier this month with heart problems (following her transplanting 17 new desert plants), Eframo says she has reconsidered the offers of help. "I need to prepare my yard for winter."

Though West Jordan tweaked its lawn ordinance after the court clash with Eframo, the rules remain vague. It requires, for instance, that 50 percent of a front yard be covered with vegetation. But a xeri-zealot could argue, exactly what does the city mean by "vegetation"? If it's water-intensive grass, then West Jordan is only taking a half-step toward water conservation.

"You have a city that claims to be favoring water conservation," Stewart says, "then adopts ordinances that fly in the face of that."

Eframo recently took her mission statewide. She has asked Sen. Chris Buttars, the closest thing Utah has to a patron saint of lost causes, to sponsor legislation that would give Utahns the right to landscape their yards as they see fit.

Buttars, who has supported bills ranging from regulating the teaching of evolution to rethinking the separation of church and state, says Eframo's proposal is probably not an issue the Legislature should tackle.

Still, he acknowledges, "She has a good point. West Jordan is in conflict with itself. The city promotes water conservation, yet they have ordinances that require large amounts of grass."

Buttars says he's sympathetic to Eframo's arguments, "but this is probably an issue that is best dealt with at the city level."

Rice admits the controversy puts the conservancy district in an uncomfortable position. The district's demonstration gardens are an inspiration for xeriscape rebels throughout the state. Eframo, in fact, has attended classes at the conservancy district and consulted with its gardeners.

"We are trying to educate the public. A lot of people out there get the message and they want to implement our ideas," he says. "We applaud them."

But, Rice says, "That's where the complication comes in. We put ourselves in the position of encouraging people to do things when the city doesn't allow it. It's troubling."

In some circles, "xeriscape" has become a dirty word, Rice says. "In some people's minds, the word conjures up the ugliest place they can think up."

The final result is that Eframo, who should be a poster child for water conservation, may find her face on a "Wanted" poster for violating city ordinances.

Though she started xeriscaping to save water, Eframo has fallen in love with the 250 drought-resistant shrubs, flowers and grasses she has painstakingly transplanted. "It's a work in progress."

She revels in the names: ice plant, Tubby Andrew, pussy toes, pink mist, beard tongue.

During a tour of her yard, she lets a blue willow sage tickle her fingers in the wind, "Look how gentle it is."

Bending over a purple hardy, she says, "Isn't it awesome. No one can tell me there is not a God."

Gazing over her yard, she says, "It's not first prize - but it's my pride."

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* GLEN WARCHOL can be contacted at gwarchol@ sltrib.com or 801-257-8739. Send comments about this story to livingeditor@sltrib.com.

Thirsty for more?

* For more information, you can visit the Jordan Valley Conservancy District's demonstration gardens at 8215 S. 1300 West, West Jordan.

* For tips and a list of water-wise landscaping classes, visit http://www.slowtheflow.org.