A Garden Above Your Head

Photo by John Lei for the New York Times

Chances are, you don’t think much about your roof unless it’s leaking and might need services such as madison roofing or Commercial Roofing, Inc. I haven’t thought of mine since I bought my house, and once when my cat got stuck up there. But depending on the size and shape of your roof, your roof could be a green oasis instead of a black tar-covered or shingled thing. Take the family above. They owned an apartment building in the West Village. They relished the time they stayed lakeside on a vacation and fashioned their rooftop after it, though instead of distant mountains, they enjoy the Empire State Building in the distance (you can see it in the photo above).

This green roof is covered in low-lying and drought-resistant seedum, which is a ground cover that comes in all sorts of shapes and colors (see photo below). The article in the NYTimes that details this roof in Manhattan includes the various costs to create the roof, and they are not exorbinant (about 13,500), and the plants and soil help cool the building in the summer, and insulates it in the winter. The owner of the building, David Puchkoff, got the idea from a seminar by Earthpledge that he attended in 2003.

Photo by John Lei for the New York Times

A gree roof also creates a mini-ecosystem amidst the city concrete.

[The daughter] Masha loves to watch Talinum calycinum, a drought-tolerant Great Plains native, one of the few plants on the roof that is not a sedum. It opens its delicate rosy-pink flowers with the sun, and closes at sundown.

She observes the ants and ladybugs, the bees and butterflies. But the birds may be her favorites.

“We have a mockingbird that sounds like a car alarm,” she said. And this spring, she watched many birds flying off with bits of mulch, used to protect a small Japanese maple, for their nests.

If you have a flat roof, you might be able to create a green roof fairly easily, and can do it for less money than the Manhattan rooftop, which was 1200 square feet. A great resource is Greenroofs.com, which bills itself as the ‘The resource portal for green roofs’. They have great images and ideas to inspire your own project, like the garage roof below, which reminded me that one doesn’t necessarily have to use a house roof (mine is a very pitch Victorian roof-style) to install a bit more green into your property.

There’s also Greenroofs.org, which specifically advocates for covering rooftops in cities. They have a quick and dirty FAQ on the whys and hows of green roofs that I thought was really informative, and they have lots of great pictures of various projects, including a corporate golf-course green roof! Which is a bit ridiculous, but still better than an ugly black roof.

It would be amazing one day to take off in a (hydrogen powered?) jet and fly over Manhattan and just see a sea of green roofs with the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building rising from the city floor, spires of silver and light, the rest a riot of flowers, trees, meadows and even forests. NRDC did a mock-up of that idea in a great article in On Earth covering green roofs in Manhattan.

Photo illustration: Heather Sommerfield/Earth Pledge