Watersmart Makeover: Creating a Serene Setting in Encinitas

Ramona Copley has lived in her Encinitas home since 1976, sharing it with her husband, David, who died last year. Their grown daughters live nearby. Today, her 16-year-old Chihuahua mix Cookey is her constant companion. Before David’s death, the couple had been planning the relandscaping of their front and backyards. They let the lawns die and David installed brick planters and concrete. They got rid of a cypress and ants destroyed white birch trees, Ramona said. Once he was in hospice and then passed, the landscaping project obviously was put on hold.

Within months, Ramona Copley, in her 80s and retired from being a seamstress for the San Diego Chargers, began to reignite the ideas that she and her late husband had put together. She had help from her stepdaughter Michelle in choosing plants that would be drought tolerant, hired a gardener after taking several bids and, in one month, had a front landscape anchored by three, four-trunk king palms that she’d been fixated on to provide shade over a dry creekbed and a variety of variegated agaves, mat rushes and dymondia lining it.