wasteland no more

Our roof deck has felt like a bar­ren waste­land ever since it was built. There’s a set of plas­tic gar­den fur­ni­ture up there, but we’ve stared at the space and won­dered why it con­tin­ues to feel so inhospitable.

For the last two years, being a gar­dener, plant­ing some­thing up there in pots has been my first thought towards a solu­tion. The space gets full sun all day, how­ever, and even though we’d thought ahead to install a hose bib up there, the last thing we want to do is to lock our­selves into a respon­si­bil­ity of try­ing to remem­ber to trudge up there X times a week to keep things watered.

There are auto­matic water­ing sys­tems out there that might have helped with the prob­lem. Orbit, for instance, makes a line of inex­pen­sive battery-powered devices that hook up to a hose or bib. Our expe­ri­ence in the past with one of these units soured us on that thought, though. We found that the thing required a lot of atten­tion to get flow and tim­ings just right, and it resulted in an octopus’s worth of lit­tle hoses going everywhere.

Also, I’ve decided that there are two kinds of peo­ple out in the world. The gad­get peo­ple are the ones who have to have the lat­est cool gizmo or sup­posed labor-saving device. They’re the first to have an iPhone and the last to pull a weed with their bare hands when there might a spe­cial device in the garage.

The sim­pli­fiers–and I usu­ally count myself in their numbers–have lit­tle use for gadets, which we typ­i­cally refer to as “toys.” We can some­times seem obstruc­tion­ist to the march of progress, and we often have to have the worth of some­thing proved to us before we adopt it. At that point we’ll call a gad­get a “nec­es­sary tool.” (A Lud­dite would be a highly devel­oped sub­species of simplifier.)

So, last week­end, this sim­pli­fier decided to finally take on the roof deck. To make long-term life eas­ier for me, the roof solu­tion had to include the fol­low­ing prac­ti­cal considerations:

  • Tough, sun-loving, drought-tolerant plants
  • Large pots (to hold mois­ture longer)
  • Mulch (to reduce evap­o­ra­tion of moisture)
  • A group­ing of pots so that the plants could shade each other

To that list, I needed to add that the cho­sen plants would have to be able to visu­ally hold their own in a large space. And of course, the end result had to be fab­u­lous, at least to my eyes. So shop­ping I went.

After spend­ing so much time out­doors, vis­it­ing every nurs­ery and home store in a ten mile radius, I came home with the worst sun­burn so far this year. I also had three pots, three plants, and sev­eral bags of pot­ting soil. Get­ting the largest pot–which must have weighed a hun­dred pounds–up the spi­ral stair­case was quite a feat, but here’s the result.

Roof plantings

Roof plant­i­ngs

In the next cou­ple of posts I’ll talk about the plants–which are all new to my garden–and then the pots, which I thought were cool finds.

August 10 2008 05:42 am | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: •

One Response to “wasteland no more”

  1. Greg on 10 Aug 2008 at 8:57 pm #

    You know, there are some lovely yel­low flow­ers that might work nicely in such a set­ting. But I know it’d just peeve you to trudge up there and see their happy faces…

    Nice planters — square pots up a round stair­case must’ve been fun. Don’t pyschol­o­gists have tests about that sort of choice? ; )

    Actu­ally, I see there’s some yel­low in your pre­vi­ous post, which I’ve not yet read…so I’ll save fur­ther com­ment for the nonce. Can’t wait to hear about the new plants, though–sorry to hear about the sun­burn. Is one of them aloe, by chance?

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